In the first episode of our second season, we take listeners to the online book release party for Hy Thurman's Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes From the Struggle at the Edge of the Rainbow (Regent Press, 2020). Respondents include Thurman and Lynn Lewis (Picture the Homeless Oral History Project), Rachel Herzing (Center for Political Education), and Allyn Maxfield-Steele (Highlander). Moderated by James Tracy (Books to the Barricades).

S2/E2: Hy Thurman: Revolutionary Hillbilly

Conversation with Sarah Jaffe and Jamie McCallum

In this episode, we are lucky to have Sarah Jaffe and Jamie McCallum in conversation. Sarah is the author of the book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. Jamie wrote  Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream. They are both part of a new generation of intellectuals engaged in the issues of labor, work and social change.  Both of their books are formidable contributions to labor history and education. They come to many of the same conclusions from  different vantage points

S2/E3: Sarah Jaffe and Jamie McCallum, Work Won't Love You Back & Worked Over

Interview with James Tracy

Conversation with Ravi Malhotra, a co-author of the new book, written with Benjamin Isitt: Able to Lead Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley. Malhotra is a professor in the Faculty of Law and the co-author or editor of important books on the politics of disability.

The subject of Malhotra and Isitt’s  book, Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, in 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be “one of the most dangerous men in Canada.”

S2/E4: Ravi Malhotra, Able to Lead

Interview by James Tracy

In The Storm Is Upon Us, he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by right-wing media and Donald Trump, through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q’s increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on.
 
And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump’s loss of the presidency—with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms proving susceptible to its messaging—and politicians starting to openly espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his impassioned reportage makes clear it’s time to figure out what QAnon really is — because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything isn’t done yet.

S2/E5: The Storm Is Upon Us-Mike Rothschild

Interview by James Tracy

This innovative study explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates. It combines instersectional theory and materialism to show that culture, economics, ideology, and consciousness are all factors that go into making “class” meaningful. Using a historical lens, it studies the experiences of working class peoples, from migrant farm workers in California’s central valley, to the “factory girls” of New England, and black workers in the South to explore the variety of working-class experiences. It investigates how the concepts of racial capitalism and black feminist thought, when applied to class studies and popular movements, allow us to walk and chew gum at the same time—to recognize that our movements can be diverse and particularistic as well as have elements of the universal experience shared by all workers. Ultimately, it argues that class is made up of all of us, it is of ourselves, in all our contradiction and complexity.

S2/E6: Michael Beyea Reagan, Intersectional Class Struggle

Juanita E. Mantz interviewed by James Tracy

The chapbook Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender (or how I became a punk rock lawyer) by Juanita E. Mantz, Esq. is a multi-genre chapbook containing memoir pieces, social justice essays and poetry. It describes the author’s love of punk rock and her quest to challenge the system of mass incarceration as a deputy public defender and the intersection between punk rock and public defense.

S2/E7: Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender

Helena Worthen & Joe Berry interviewed by James Tracy

Higher education is the site of an ongoing conflict. At the heart of this struggle are the precariously employed faculty ‘contingents’ who work without basic job security, living wages or benefits. Yet they have the incentive and, if organized, the power to shape the future of higher education.

Power Despite Precarity is part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen outline the four historical periods that led to major transitions in the worklives of faculty of this sector. They then take a deep dive into the 30-year-long struggle by California State University lecturers to negotiate what is recognized as the best contract for contingents in the US.

The authors ask: what is the role of universities in society? Whose interests should they serve? What are the necessary conditions for the exercise of academic freedom?  Providing strategic insight for activists at every organizing level, they also tackle 'troublesome questions’ around legality, union politics, academic freedom and how to recognize friends (and foes) in the struggle.

S2/E8: Helena Worthen & Joe Berry, Power Despite Precarity

Interviewed by Jean Yaste

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.

S2/E9: Silvia Federici

Interview by James Tracy

Training in a Thai gym is hard enough as a foreigner.

For a foreigner in Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic it requires, as the Thais say, hard bones to work through.

Heather is a Muay Thai fighter from the US who leaves her economically precarious life to train in Thailand, only to find herself stuck in the deep isolation of a global pandemic. She avoids Covid-19 thanks to a strict lockdown, but she barely survives the loneliness and goes deep into her mind and body. From rebuilding lost strength in the gym and encountering a burgeoning democratic movement, to making merit at temples and learning the Thai language, solidarity is the thread that binds her to a country that isn’t hers. Longing for connection but terrified of vulnerability, Heather pushes forward into the unknown and onto a path that crosses with several interesting characters who each have something to teach her about masculinity, trauma, hope, and the nature of reality.

S2/E11: Heather Squire, Hard Bones

Interview by James Tracy

Chicago was a city of wanderers, truants, and delinquents. It was home to the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in the country, as well as a dizzying number of public and private institutions for wayward children, indigents, the mad, and the poor. Chicago's socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviors of the immigrants and "lower classes." Yet, the savage race riots of 1919 laid bare the eugenic truth of an ongoing, second Civil War operating as the Northern status quo. Billheimer turns a life-long obsession with the ephemera of Chicago history to tell the City's story through the relics of her forgotten places.

S2/E12: Martin Billheimer, Mother Chicago

Authors Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien in conversation with Rowan

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

S3/E1: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune: 2052-2072

Interview by James Tracy

On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South--including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana--as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day.

S2/E10: Edward Onaci, Free the Land!

The Howard Zinn Book Fair is an annual gathering of authors, booksellers, readers and activists. Books to the Barricades is our ongoing series of conversations with authors.

Howard Zinn Book Fair: Books to the Barricades

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks