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.
The conventional economic wisdom holds that humans started to use money as an outgrowth of bartering — and that money represented a great leap forward for civilization. That couldn’t be further from the truth, argues David McNally. Money, he contends, has not been a benign development, but has since its inception been tied to warfare … Continued
The failure to unionize the South, to organize Southern workers in the 1930s and ’40s on the basis of interracial worker solidarity, had momentous and enduring consequences for race relations and worker well-being in the U.S. as a whole. So argues Michael Goldfield, who in his new book points to the marginalization of leftists within … Continued
Brilliant theorist of non-violent social change or Cold War defense intellectual and strategist? Gene Sharp has had a tremendous influence on progressive ideas and activism since the early 1970s and his ideas are so pervasive that at times they appear to be without a history, just part of the air we breath on the left. … Continued
In the Jim Crow South, African Americans were criminalized. The flip side of that coin, asserts Tammy Ingram, was the decriminalization of whites. Ingram reveals how local authorities tolerated, enabled, and at times actively collaborated with white mobsters in Phenix City, Alabama. (Encore presentation.) Amy Wood and Natalie Ring, eds., Crime and Punishment in the … Continued
The protests spurred by police killings of African Americans and other people of color has finally brought the punitive nature of the U.S. state into national view. Writer JoAnn Wypijewski argues that for at least the past half century we’ve been witnessing a particularly punishing turn by the state, often fueled by moral panics about … Continued
What if workers, not bosses, collectively made all the important decisions in and about their workplaces and production processes? Victor Wallis examines whether and how workers’ control was achieved in past periods of revolution and upheaval, including the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and Chile under Salvador Allende. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and … Continued
The widespread protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd are continuing without any end in sight, despite curfew orders. Radical scholar Jordan Camp places the upheaval that’s taking place within the larger history of urban rebellions in the United States, from Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2014, … Continued
Four takes on the African American predicament: Price Cobbs on Black rage; Juliet Hooker on whether Blacks should peacefully acquiesce; Frank Wilderson III on the African American experience of “social death”; and George Yancy on the violence of the white gaze. William Grier and Price Cobbs, Black Rage Wipf and Stock Frank Wilderson III, Afropessimism … Continued
While the United States is in the throes of upheaval over police murders, we take a historical look back at another time of great social ferment: a century ago, when the workers of Seattle shut that city down. The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last widespread pandemic — the … Continued
Psychoanalyst and educator Michael B. Donner on narcissism and its roots in childhood, plus social theorist Richard Lichtman on authoritarianism’s appeal.
