This interview with members of Chuang was conducted as a collaboration among Cinder Bloc, The Charles H Kerr Podcast, and The Antifada podcasts.

We are pleased to share this new interview with Chuang, the collective author of our latest book, Social Contagion and other material on the microbiological class war in China. 

Together we sent questions to Chuang and received answers which Cinder Bloc transcribed and then, together with our podcaster comrades, we re-recorded the script as a cohesive interview.  We did this in order to ensure legibility for listeners as well as anonymity for the Chuang collective due to international security concerns. 

Thank you to Chuang for the interview and to Cinder Bloc and The Antifada for the enormous amount of work they have put into this process.  The result is an impressive expansion on the book, with extensions and updates to the analysis in Social Contagion as well as strategic reflections on how revolutionaries, in whatever part of the world, can navigate and sharpen the crises which define our times. 

We would like to note that none of us are members of Chuang, and that none of us are native speakers of Mandarin and that out of respect for Chuang, we pronounced everything to the best of our abilities.

Episode Two- Dirty Work: Chuang on China, Communism, and Social Contagion

Welcome to the first installment of the Charles H Kerr Podcast!

Charles H Kerr is the longest running radical publishing house in the US, founded in Chicago weeks before the Haymarket tragedy of 1886.  In the years since, Kerr has remained a vital outlet for socialist, anarchist, Black radical, labor history, and surrealist materials. 

On this show, we will plumb everything from the back catalog of the 1920s to today's cutting edge radical analysis to unearth neglected stories about revolutionary movements in the US.  Every Kerr book comes with a fascinating backstory, and we'll be sharing them with you as we explore radical history and ideas with authors, organizers, artists, and rebels. 

For the first installment of the show, we sit in on a conversation between Penelope Rosemont and David Roediger, who both worked on Kerr for decades.  Penelope, along with her late husband Franklin, is a major figure in North American Surrealism since the 1960s.  David is a historian of race and class at University of Kansas, who in this interview, traces his work as a radical organizer to 1970s Chicago.  Together, they draw a line from socialist revolutionaries of the 1910s, Big Bill Haywood and Mary Marcy, through radical agitation at Roosevelt University and CLR James's Chicago years in the 1960s, onwards to their efforts to bring Kerr to its centenary year, marking 1986 with the lush Haymarket Scrapbook.  They both speak to the continued importance of books and publishing to radical organizing.

Thanks for checking out the debut installment of the podcast. We will continue to air conversations between fascinating writers and revolutionaries, artists and organizers.

The music in this episode is Wesley Wallace’s No. 29, featured in Paul Garon and Gene Tomko’s book “What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes and the Their Songs.”  Garon is a long-term Kerr contributor and board member.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the history of Charles H Kerr Publishing, you can read “We Called Each Other Comrade” by Allen Ruff. Find out more about Kerr at their website: charleshkerr.com

Charles H Kerr Podcast

Episode One- History Against Misery: Penelope Rosemont & David Roediger on the History of Kerr

On this show, we take you to the library of the oldest radical publisher in the US, Charles H Kerr. And here we find the latest analysis of today’s movements, alongside the long-lost stories of revolutionary movements going back to the Haymarket tragedy of 1886. Our guests are authors, organizers, artists, and rebels who found something in the back catalog of CHK that the world needs to hear.

The Charles H Kerr Podcast

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