Episodes
Sep 23, 2022
Season 0
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Haymarket Poetry: All the Blood Involved in Love
Join Maya Marshall and special guests for a celebration of her new book All the Blood Involved in Love.
All the Blood Involved in Love is an urgent and evocative collection—featuring complex and compelling poems about the choices we make surrounding home, freedom, healing, partnership, and family.
In a moment of critical struggle for reproductive justice, Maya Marshall’s haunting debut meditates on womanhood—with and without motherhood. Traversing familial mythography with an unflinching seriousness, Marshall moves deftly between contemporary politics, the stakes of race and interracial partnership, and the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.
Get All the Blood Involved in Love from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1884-all-the-blood-involved-in-love
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Speakers:
Maya Marshall, a writer and editor, is cofounder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. As an educator, Marshall has taught at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. She is the author of Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her writing appears in Best New Poets 2019, Muzzle, RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. All the Blood Involved in Love is Marshall’s debut poetry collection with Haymarket Books.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing.
Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Texas. She is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). She lives in Dallas, Texas.
Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit, MI. She is the author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books) winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony. Aricka lives in Chicago and works as a publicist at Haymarket Books.
Nicole Homer is an Associate Professor of English at a community college in Central New Jersey. They are a poet, writer, and performer whose work can be found in the American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, Muzzle, The Offing, Rattle, The Collagist and elsewhere. A fellow of The Watering Hole, Callaloo and VONA, Nicole serves as a Contributing Editor at BlackNerdProblems writing pop culture critique through a POC lens. Their award-winning collection, Pecking Order (Write Bloody) is an unflinching look at how race and gender politics play out in the domestic sphere.
Natasha Oladokun (she/her) is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review Online, and Kenyon Review Online. You can read her column The PettyCoat Chronicles—on pop culture and period dramas—at Catapult. She is Associate Poetry Editor at storySouth, and currently lives in Madison, WI.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/qFVhGJYqI98
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 23, 2022
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Rehearsals for Living w/ Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Join Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for a discussion on abolitionist horizons for a world in crisis, hosted by Naomi Murakawa.
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here.
Rehearsals is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit. In a genre-defying exchange, the authors collectively envision the possibilities for more liberatory futures during a historic year of Indigenous land defense, prison strikes, and global-Black-led rebellions against policing. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment in the first place, Maynard and Simpson create something new: a vital demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up new ways of ordering earthly life.
Get Rehearsals for Living from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living
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Speakers:
Robyn Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto, and the author of the national bestseller Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Her writings on policing, feminism, abolition, and Black liberation are taught widely across North America and Europe.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. She is the editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/tyi8oO4oU5U
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
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Keywords for Capitalism: A Field Guide for Decoding the Language of Power, Society, and Politics
Join John Patrick Leary & Greg Grandin on the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths used to disguise the horrors of our political system.
From "liberal" to "the economy" the terms used by "pundits" and politicians to explain our civic structures tend to obscure as much as they reveal about the reality they ostensibly describe. Yet the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building can be equally opaque when filtered through both the distortions of the status quo and the partisan interests of the activist left. How do we make sense of terms like "socialism" and "intersectional" that are so routinely used and abused by such a wide array of commentators from across the political spectrum?
In his new book, Keywords for Capitalism, John Patrick Leary offers a probing and insightful guide designed to equip readers with the tools to do just that. Leary takes a wit-sharpened scalpel to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths that crowd ‘the discourse’ and reveals the ideology of the mainstream political media that lies just below the surface.
Leary will be joined for this launch event by Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin. Together they will masterfully dress down and dissect the froth of corporate media jargon that we may not even know we’re forced to swim through on a daily basis.
Get Keywords for Capitalism from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism
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Speakers:
John Patrick Leary is the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism and A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the US Imagination. He teaches social studies in the Philadelphia public schools.
Greg Grandin is the author of The Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth, Empire’s Workshop, The Empire of Necessity, and is currently the C Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6C_AoUzEviw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
Season 0
Episode 0
The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right
Join David Roediger and Nan Enstad as they challenge the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination.
The slogan, “save the middle class,” has become ubiquitous within political circles, despite the fact that it misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths that the US is a providentially middle class nation.
In these discussions the middle class is implicitly white and presented—usually by liberal commentators—as unheard amidst concerns for racial justice and for the poor.
In this launch for David Roediger’s The Sinking Middle Class, the author will be joined by Nan Enstad for a discussion how the image of the United States as a middle class nation corresponds to neither contemporary nor historical reality.
Get The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1879-the-sinking-middle-class
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Speakers:
Nan Enstad is the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of Cigarettes Inc: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. Her research and teaching examines the history of global capitalism and how people have lived and struggled within and against it. She has longstanding commitments to cultural, anti-racist, ethnic, labor, queer, and gender studies that inform how she approach any subject. She is currently exploring controversies around large-scale animal agriculture.
David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race and Marxism.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/ShDFFAROHRU
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Sep 26, 2022
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Episode 0
Freeing Education — Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure
Join No More Exclusions, Haymarket Books, and Hajar Press for a series of conversations on abolitionist education.
Over the course of three online discussions, No More Exclusions will bring together radical voices from the UK and international community to develop an abolitionist vision of education. Exchanges will take place across different contexts, linking them via shared themes of community, resistance, and liberation in the face of education systems that insist on violence.
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Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure
The first conversation will focus on unpicking the harms of schooling as part of a wider system of carceral feminism and imperialism, before turning to explore the transformational work that is currently in progress and taking stock of the struggle in education from an international perspective.
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About No More Exclusions
https://nomoreexclusions.com/
No More Exclusions is a grassroots abolitionist coalition working to end exclusion in education in all its forms.
You can find out more about NME’s work here: https://bit.ly/3Pf9mW0.
If you are able, please consider making a solidarity donation to NME’s crowdfunder here: https://bit.ly/3aPAvQv.
Speakers:
Zahra Bei (she/her) is a Recovering Teacher and Organizer with No More Exclusions.
Lola Olufemi (she/they) is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London.
Sara Bafo (she/her) is an Organiser with No More Exclusions
Cradle Community is a collective experimenting with how we build transformative justice and community accountability in our communities. If you are able, please consider supporting Cradle’s work here: https://bit.ly/3yLCvRD.
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This event series is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, Hajar Press, and No More Exclusions.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7uC1M5acVVQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 14, 2022
Season 0
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Is Social Work Obsolete?
Join Kassandra Frederique and Michelle Grier for a conversation centering an abolitionist approach to social work.
Taking inspiration from Angela Davis' "Are Prisons Obsolete?", Is Social Work Obsolete? will explore the historical and contemporary harms of the social work profession and ask whether it is capable of transformation, or if it is irreparable and in fact obsolete. This conversation will also explore the need to build systems of care rooted self-determination, liberation and collective wellbeing.
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Speakers:
Kassandra Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs—which has disproportionately harmed Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities—and build alternatives grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. During her time at DPA, Frederique has built and led innovative campaigns around policing, the overdose crisis, and marijuana legalization—each with a consistent racial justice focus. Her advocacy, and all of the Drug Policy Alliance’s work, lies at the intersection of health, equity, autonomy, and justice.
Michelle Grier (she/her) is a Black feminist committed to intergenerational advocacy and liberatory healing practices. Grier has over 10 years of experience leading mental health programs and youth-centered programs in schools and nonprofits. She is a member of the NAASW and grateful for the space to foster conversations about abolition and social work.
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This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Y1WvSupCSDI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 7, 2022
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Political Repression in Egypt: Courts Under Military Dictatorship
Join us for a discussion of the transformation of Egypt's courts in a system of authoritarian presidential rule under Sisi, with US backing.
*Arabic interpretation of this event is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1En5CdxJO7RaMr6Hezi19MFKrUgivR3a9/view?usp=sharing*
The modern Egyptian judiciary was established in the middle of the 19th century and is one of the oldest in the Middle East. Throughout the 20th century and the first decade of this century, it enjoyed a large degree of independence from the executive branch of government. Since the coup of July 2013, led by then-head of the armed forces and current President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, the Egyptian state has gradually turned the judiciary into a subservient extension of presidential power to eradicate all opposition and critical voices from the public sphere.
In this forum, experts on Egyptian legal history, human rights, and international law will discuss these attacks on the judiciary in Egypt, the complicity of the US and other Western governments, and the role of global solidarity in supporting victims of the military dictatorship in Egypt.
Speakers:
Khaled Fahmy is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Modern Arabic Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of nineteenth-century Egypt, with special emphasis on the social history of the army, medicine and the law. His most recent book, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt, won the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History in 2019.
Nancy Okail is President and CEO of the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. She is a leading scholar, policy analyst, and advocate with more than 20 years of experience working on issues of human rights, democracy, and security in the Middle East and North Africa. In her subsequent role as Director of Freedom House’s Egypt program, Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She was then exonerated by court ruling in December of 2018.
Richard A. Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus at Princeton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of The Nation and The Progressive, and Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. During 1999–2000, Falk worked on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He blogs at Global Justice in the 21st Century.
Yasmin Omar (moderator) is a human rights lawyer. She specializes in international law, UN mechanisms, and global sanctions. She practiced law in Egypt for ten years, defending victims of human rights violations, before moving to the United States after being targeted for her work. Omar is a member of the Steering Committee of the US Committee to End Political Repression in Egypt and the UN and regional mechanism officer at the Committee for Justice.
This event is sponsored by the US Committee to End Political Repression in Egypt, Haymarket Books, the Committee for Justice, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the Freedom Initiative, Internationalism from Below, Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), and St. John’s Center for International and Comparative Law.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/uvoXX7y75ao
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 10, 2022
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Episode 0
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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Episode 0
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