Haymarket Originals brings in depth, series-length audio treatments of a wide range of historical and contemporary political subjects to podcast listeners around the world.
The first season of Haymarket Originals was FRAGILE JUGGERNAUT: WHAT WAS THE CIO?—a limited series revisiting and reflecting on the near-mythical trajectory of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the high water mark of US labor activity in the 1930s and 1940s.
What does it *feel like* to build worker power? Season two of Haymarket Originals brings you inside one of the most dynamic and inspiring organizing drives in the labor movement today. HEAT THE GROUND UP is an oral history of Starbucks Workers United, voiced by the baristas who built it.
Episode four of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the panorama of social life transfigured by the first three years of the Great Depression. By examining the sharp and persisting business downturn as a crisis of social reproduction—in which the conditions for working people to reproduce themselves appeared to permanently subside—Tim, Ben, Emma, and Andrew discuss how challenges of survival transformed into struggles defending working-class life.
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy Radical Unionism, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/559-radical-unionism
Episode five of Fragile Juggernaut is a dramatic retelling of the nearly-revolutionary strikes of 1934, in Toledo and San Francisco, in Minneapolis and across America’s textile belt: moments that dramatize the powerful interaction between radical militant minorities on the shop floor and mass working class struggles. Frustrated by the passivity of “the National Run Around” of FDR’s first years in office, workers took up “self-help” in the form of fighting unionism. Their violently fought strikes would go on to produce a new “social warrant” for working class self-activity in the years to come.
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy Revolutionary Teamsters, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/605-revolutionary-teamsters
Episode six of Fragile Juggernaut pivots to high politics and institutional history: chronicling the passage of the Wagner Act, debating its significance, and recounting the raucous AFL convention in Atlantic City where the CIO was born. Featuring special guest Eric Blanc.
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy The Lean Years and The Turbulent Years, 20% Off:
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/319-the-lean-years
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/320-the-turbulent-years
Episode seven of Fragile Juggernaut dramatizes the Sit Down strikes that built the UAW: why they proved to be powerful, what effect they had on the labor movement, and the truly global spread of the strike tactic. The fight in Flint and Cleveland, Kansas City and Atlanta, provides an occasion to talk both about the global organization of production and highly contingent efforts to root out spies, covering both the architectonics of capital and street battles barely won against advancing cops. These stories are where structural analysis meets the heist movie.
We want to flag two small factual mistakes on this episode: at one point Gabe refers to the federal CIO locals where he means federal AFL locals; elsewhere, Ben says Fisher Body a few times when he means the Chevy plant.
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy Unite and Win: The Workplace Organizer’s Handbook:
Episode 8 of Fragile Juggernaut places us back in the critical juncture of 1936: the final year of Roosevelt’s first term in office. What were FDR’s re-election prospects as workers’ insurgencies erupted from below and as capital waited in vain for the courts to demolish the Wagner Act? What did this juncture mean for the CIO and its relationship to electoral politics? Episode 8 dives into these questions and surveys the evolving links between the CIO, leftwing intellectuals in the Roosevelt administration, and the Democratic Party. Featuring special guest Samir Sonti, an assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
Featured music: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Back Again (The New Lost City Ramblers); Old Age Pension Check (The New Lost City Ramblers); Farmer-Labor Train (Woody Guthrie); Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt (McKinley Peebles)
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy The Long Deep Grudge, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1383-the-long-deep-grudge
Episode 9 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of a series of thematic episodes, in which we pause our chronological narrative to survey key issues shaping the world of the CIO. In this episode, we turn our view on the escalating confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism. Was there an American fascism? Where did it come from and what did it look like? How did it relate to the labor movement? And what was the meaning of the Popular Front, the broad left coalition against fascism?
Featured music: “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” (Billy Bragg, originally Woody Guthrie); “La Crisis Actual” (Los Cancioneros Alegres); “Ballad for Americans” (Paul Robeson); “Ballad of October 16” (The Almanac Singers); “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” (The Almanac Singers)
Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.
Support us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut/posts
Buy The Black Antifascist Tradition, 20% Off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2223-the-black-antifascist-tradition
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