Podcast Series
Haymarket Books Live
Haymarket Books Live is a regular online series of urgent political discussions, book launches, organizer roundtables, poetry jams, and more, hosted by Haymarket Books. The podcast features recordings of our livestreamed video event series. Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago.
Episodes
Mar 10, 2022
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Putin’s War on Ukraine: History, Analysis, Solidarity
Join a panel with Ukrainian activists and analysts for a discussion of the present crisis, war, and a genuine internationalist perspective.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine is among the most dangerous and disturbing events in recent European history and has occasioned an international crisis. Putin appears hell-bent on occupying all of Ukraine and setting up a puppet regime. While the situation is in flux and it's unclear how it will play out, it is certain that the human consequences of the war will be horrendous, and the geopolitical consequences perilous.
How should we make sense of this crisis? What are the historical dynamics behind the current juncture? What are the ideological components of Putinism? What's wrong with the responses of many leftists and antiwar activists? In contrast, what would a genuine socialist-internationalist perspective on the issue look like? How do Ukrainian and Russian leftists view the situation, and why are their perspectives missing from so much of the discussion on the Western left?
This forum will address these and related questions.
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Speakers:
Denys Pilash is a political scientist and leftist activist in Kyiv. He is a member of the Social Movement (Sotsialniy Rukh) democratic socialist organization and serves on the editorial board of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, a publication of the Ukrainian left that offers critical analysis on economy, politics, history and culture.
Hanna Perekhoda is a doctoral student at the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Lausanne and a member of solidaritéS in Vaud Canton, Switzerland. Her research examines debates over the Ukrainian question among the Bolsheviks. She is a native of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.
Catherine Samary is the author of Yugoslavia Dismembered. She is a frequent contributor to Le Monde diplomatique and is associated with the journal and network Balkanologie. She is a member of the scientific council of Attac France and serves on the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Stephen R. Shalom (moderator) is on the editorial board of New Politics and a member of Internationalism from Below. He is the author of The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism and Imperial Alibis: Rationalizing U.S. Intervention After the Cold War and editor of Socialist Visions.
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This event is sponsored by Internationalism from Below, New Politics magazine, Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement) Ukraine, Solidarity, the Tempest Collective and Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.
Mar 17, 2022
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From Data Criminalization to Prison Abolition
Join abolitionist organizers connecting the dots between surveillance capitalism, border imperialism, and neoliberal prison reforms.
A dominant mode of our time, data analysis and prediction are part of a longstanding historical process of racial and national profiling, management and control in the US. In a new report, From Data Criminalization to Prison Abolition, Community Justice Exchange examines the interlocked machineries of migrant surveillance and describes processes of “data criminalization:” the creation, archiving, theft, resale and analysis of datasets that mark some of us as threats and risks, based on data culled about us from state and commercial sources.
How might we fight data criminalization on our terms? Rather than being drawn into arguments about privacy, accuracy, or the theatrics of consumer consent and regulatory oversight, we assert that these datasets are inherently illegitimate, and creation and use of them should be abolished. What if we organized our resistance based on that premise?
Speakers:
J. Khadijah Abdurahman is an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive analytics in the US child welfare system and the Horn of Africa. They are the founder of We Be Imagining, a public interest technology project at Columbia University’s INCITE Center and The American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program. WBI draws on the Black radical tradition to develop public technology through infusing academic discourse with the performance arts in partnership with community based organizations.
Jacinta González is a senior campaign organizer with Mijente and leads their #NoTechforICE campaign. Previously, she worked at PODER in México, organizing the Río Sonora River Basin committees against water contamination by the mining industry. Jacinta was the lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice Congress of Day Laborers (2007-2014). In Louisiana Gonzalez helped establish a base of day laborers and undocumented families dedicated to building worker power, advancing racial justice, and organizing against deportations in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Sarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an abolitionist and organizer working in the Pacific Northwest. She leads the policing technology campaign at the Carceral Tech Resistance Network: an archiving and knowledge sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies. Sarah co-founded the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign—a police and prison abolition resource built during last summer’s uprisings against state violence.
Puck Lo (she/they) is the Research Director of Community Justice Exchange, an abolitionist organization that supports organizers to fight all forms of incarceration and social control. They spent the last year examining Department of Homeland Security's data regimes and other expanding systems of corporeal theft and predictive criminalization.
Harsha Walia (moderator) is the author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism and an organizer rooted in migrant justice, abolitionist, antiracist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist movements for over two decades.
This event is sponsored by Community Justice Exchange and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/FTg20fo3nyk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 18, 2022
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Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns
Join veteran labor organizers Joe Burns and Barbara Madeloni for a discussion about how to rebuild a fighting labor movement.
Celebrate the launch of Joe Burns' new book, Class Struggle Unionism, with a conversation between Burns and Barbara Madeloni about how we can create a more militant, democratic and fighting labor movement.
How should workers relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? How much should the labor movement prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us?
Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society.
Order a copy of Class Struggle Unionism for 30% off HERE: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism
"There is nothing more essential for the resurgence of the labor movement than cutting through the racial, social, gender and political divisions driven by the corporate class to deny working class power and keep workers in competition with each other. Class Struggle Unionism not only defines the urgency of our common struggle, it's a textbook on how to organize around our common demands right where we work in order to build a movement strong enough to realize an inclusive economy and thriving democracy." —Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO
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Speakers:
Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Class Struggle Unionism, Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.
Barbara Madeloni is a staff organizer and writer at Labor Notes. Prior to coming to Labor Notes she was the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, where she was elected out of a left caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union. She remains active in the caucus and in the United Caucus f Rank and File Educators.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T8uMeHEx7zw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 29, 2022
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The Billboard: A Play About Abortion. Launch event w/ Natalie Y. Moore
Join playwright Natalie Y. Moore and director TaRon Patton for a performance and discussion from The Billboard: A Play About Abortion.
The Billboard is about a fictional Black women’s clinic in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and its fight with a local gadfly running for City Council who puts up a provocative billboard: “Abortion is genocide. The most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother’s womb,” spurring on the clinic to fight back with their own provocative sign: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #Trust Black Women.”
As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice.
Join us for the live stream of our limited-capacity in-person book launch event featuring a performance from The Billboard and a conversation with playwright Natalie Y. Moore and director TaRon Patton.
Order your copy of The Billboard for 30% off here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1788-the-billboard
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Presenters:
Natalie Y. Moore is an award winning Chicago-based author and journalist and author of The Billboard: A Play About Abortion. Her last book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, won the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction. She is a 2021 USA Fellow and the Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting.
TaRon Patton has been a Congo Square Theater ensemble member for 20 years. She is currently the CEO of GLP PRODUCTIONS, INC and just recently returned to the stage: Her Honor Mayor Byrne (Lookingglass Theater) after serving 4 years as Executive Director for Congo Square. She is also the Co-Founding Executive Director of the African American Museum of the Performing Arts.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/CfTw8QIEpaI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 1, 2022
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Fight Like Hell: A Tribute to Mike Davis, with Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Geri Silva
¡Mike Davis, presente! Three longtime allies of Mike Davis (1946–2022) will discuss the life and legacy of the author, geologist, historian, and organizer—and the inspiration we take from his life and work for the struggles ahead.
Speakers:
Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis’s memoir was recently published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.
Geri Silva, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has spent the past 40 years in all forms of struggle for human, political, and economic rights. Her activity covers the span from immigration rights to welfare rights to the right to decent housing for all in need. For the past 20-plus years she has fought against the rampant and ongoing abuses in the courts and at the hands of the police. Silva is a founding member of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) in 1992, Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes (FACTS) in 1996, Fair Chance Project (FCP) in 2009, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) in 2011, and FUEL—Families United to End LWOP (Life Without Parole) in 2017.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/u5xtmUWdWbc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 2, 2022
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Solidarity with Railroad Workers
Join a panel of rank-and-file railroad workers for a discussion of one of the most important struggles in recent labor history.
Railroad workers are currently engaged in one of the most important struggles in recent labor history, in an industry that is at the heart of the functioning of society. The rail industry has seen massive deregulation, lean production, and persistent undermining of working conditions that have made the work all but intolerable.
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Join the Community Solidarity Committee! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSem9qSAGziUtRK9bn0WAGSxpOJ_C1eKsenf60yKsJyNDWYFow/viewform?usp=sf_link
Check out the Solidarity Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10sf8-y3CyBh5B9PEZeAw_MgyoMvVdNNNOJYzd4zIcNQ/edit?usp=sharing
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Despite enormous political pressure, railroad workers are fed up, evidenced by the sections of workers who are voting NO on a Tentative Agreement that they feel doesn't address the base safety and quality of life issues they are willing to strike over. Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union democratic rank and file organization of railroad workers, has launched a Vote No Campaign, insisting that this Tentative Agreement offers very little given the conditions they face and the role they play in the economy. If the railroad workers lead a strike, it will have immediate implications - economically and politically - for every sector of US society. Most importantly for the labor movement, and for socialists and radicals within it.
Come hear Railroad Workers United members speak about their struggle, the situation on the rails, and how you can get involved in efforts to support them. The success of this campaign is of urgent importance, and solidarity must be built.
Featuring: Engineers and conductors from Railroad Workers United, facilitated by Maximillion Alvarez from The Real News who has covered this struggle extensively.
Co-Sponsored by: Railroad Workers United, Haymarket Books, and Many more.
View full list of co-sponsors here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ok2RkkD0TcNmNU8BGXbdeCPT7NRblpMckSbq1Djxq14/edit?usp=sharing.
This event is sponsored by Railroad Workers United and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7gU-Vj_-IqY
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 4, 2022
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Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire
Join Mosab Abu Toha, Refaat Areer, and Jehad Abusalim for the launch of the book, "Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire." They will discuss the brilliant new book Light in Gaza, which is a seminal, moving and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. The book constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle for liberation.
Get the book, Light in Gaza, here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1885-light-in-gaza
Speakers:
Refaat Alareer is a professor of English, teaching world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and nonfiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He is the coeditor of Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books, 2015) and the editor of (and a contributor to) Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (Just World, 2014).
Jehad Abusalim is a scholar, writer, and public speaker completing his PhD in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. He has worked with AFSC since 2018. He contributed to other anthologies including Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst Publishers, 2016) and Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books, 2020).
Mosab Abu Toha is a poet, essayist, short story writer, and the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. In 2019–20, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University. His published work includes Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (City Lights Books, 2022).
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1861-light-in-gaza
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/4u6aagh4ZIE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 7, 2022
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After Life: A Conversation on Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America
Join us for a discussion on the collective history of the experience of COVID-19, mass uprisings for racial justice, and more.
Join Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, Yohuru Williams and Heather Ann Thompson as they discuss their the new book After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America. They will share their thoughts on the collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election.
Get After Life from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1927-after-life
Speakers:
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She was the 2020 President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Barnes is the author of the forthcoming book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface.
Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian, writer, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and the co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power.
Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History, and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven, and Teaching Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies, and, co-author with Bryan Shih of The Black Panthers: Portrait of an Unfinished Revolution.
Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, as well as a public intellectual who writes for such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, and The Nation. Thompson has received research fellowships from such institutions as Harvard University, Art for Justice, Cambridge University, and the Guggenheim, and her justice advocacy work has also been recognized with a number of distinguished awards.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/4i6x8KDkirc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 9, 2022
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Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972
Join Boston Female Liberation members for a discussion about the group’s history, strategy, and legacy, as well as lessons for today.
Join us for a conversation celebrating the release of Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972 An Account By Participants.
Author Nancy Rosenstock together with Delpfine Welch, two of the women featured in the book who were members of Boston Female Liberation—a key radical feminist organization during the second wave of feminism, will provide an inside account of the group’s history, strategy and numerous activities from fighting to legalize abortion, to campaigning for free 24-hour childcare, to linking up with the anti-Vietnam War movement.
They will be joined by two members of Chicago for Abortion Rights, Lauren Bianchi and Gina Rozman-Wendle, to discuss the relevance of this history for today’s feminist movements.
Get a copy of "Inside the Second Wave": https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Fa6rvig5yVk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 22, 2022
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Yes We Do Mean Smash the State: In Defense of Revolution
brian bean speaks at this session recorded at Socialism 2022. This session was sponsored by Rampant magazine.
https://rampantmag.com
Contemporary capitalism exploits and degrades human beings around the world, relying on the violent power of states to create profits, guarantee the functioning of markets, and cheapen labor through violence. There is no way to build a liberated future for all of us without overthrowing capitalism, and that will mean confronting and dismantling the capitalist state, its prisons, policing, borders, and military. It’s time we talk about smashing the state.
***Listen to all of the sessions from the Socialism 2022 conference by subscribing to the Socialism Conference podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts.***
Listen on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soci…ce/id1648960830
Listen on Soundcloud: @socialismconf
Listen on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/38mBCw7Kwu0rkOKRARIfDk
Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.socialismconference.org.
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org