For this episode of Salvage Live, Amelia Horgan, Sarah Jaffe, and our hosts discuss the Problem with Work, and what to do about it. ***Please note: This discussion was recorded on May 30, 2022. We are releasing it now because the discussion remains highly relevant and valuable.*** Among capitalism’s greatest tricks has been its ability to get buy-in for the various magical tales it spins about work. From the Hallmark-worthy ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,’ to the oft repeated line that ‘anyone can work hard and become a billionaire,’ we are inundated from birth with these and other seductive stories about the system’s many supposed virtues. Yet these bromides are increasingly out of sync with our reality. As inequality grows to historic proportions, and the dreams of achieving fulfillment through our jobs butts up against the exploitative nature of our 9 to 5’s, the ideological varnish has finally begun to corrode. In their recent books, Amelia Horgan and Sarah Jaffe both draw our attention to this chipping façade and point to the burgeoning resistance—from unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon warehouses, to home health workers demanding better pay and benefits for their care work—to the pleasant sounding lies offered by capital’s conscious and unconscious defenders. In this episode of Salvage Live Horgan and Jaffe will take on the problem with work in our current moment, and make the case for militant work-place activity and anti-capitalism as its only solution. ———————————————————————————————— Speakers: Amelia Horgan is a writer, researcher and editor from London. She is currently a PhD candidate on work at the University of Essex’s School of Philosophy and Art History. Her first book, Lost in Work (Pluto Press) came out this year. Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center fellow and the author of Work Won't Love You Back and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. You can read her piece in the latest issue of Salvage. Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’ Barnaby Raine is writing his PhD at Columbia University on visions of ending capitalism. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Salvage and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/sJ7tvjLlD_U Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Noor Hindi and special guests for a celebration of her new book DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. What is political poetry and linguistic activism? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? When language proves insufficient, how do we find and articulate a pathway forward? DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. interrogates, subverts, and expands these questions through poems that are formally and lyrically complex, dynamic, and innovative. With rich intertextuality and an unwavering eye, Noor Hindi explores and interrogates colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and the complex intersections of her identity. Noor Hindi’s debut is ultimately a provocation: on trauma, on art, and on what it takes to truly see the world for what it is/isn’t and change it for the better. Get DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1871-dear-god-dear-bones-dear-yellow --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. is her debut collection of poems. She lives in Dearborn. https://noorhindi.com/ George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet, performance artist, and writer from Jacksonville, FL. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and the Big Other Book Award in Poetry, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry, and was named on Best of 2020 lists with The Asian American Writers' Workshop, The New Arab, and Entropy Magazine. https://www.gabrahampoet.com/ Summer Farah is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is currently the outreach coordinator for the Radius of Arab American Writers and co-writes the biweekly newsletter Letters to Summer. In 2021, she served as the poetry editor for the FIYAH Lit Palestine Solidarity issue. She is a Winter 2022 Tin House Fellow. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Mizna, LitHub, The Rumpus, and other places. https://summerfarah.com/ Ghinwa Jawhari is a Lebanese American writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born to Druze parents in Cleveland, OH. Her chapbook BINT was selected by Aria Aber for Radix Media's Own Voices Chapbook Prize. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Narrative, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, and others. Ghinwa is a 2021 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. https://www.ghinwajawhari.com/ Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her full-length collection THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. She is a Radius of Arab American Writers board member and a 2022 Mass Cultural Council Fellow. jessrizkallah.com Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist and writer. He is the winner of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and a Taurus. He has received fellowships from Rhizome DC, VisArts, Desert Nights Rising Stars, Halcyon Arts Lab, Mosaic Theater, and RAWI. His writing appears in Foglifter, Mizna, Peach Mag, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, the Shallow Ends, Prolit, and select bags of Nomadic Grounds Coffee. His performance work has been programmed at OUTsider Fest, INTER-SECTION Solo Fest, the Rachel Corrie Foundation’s Shuruq Festival, the Alwun House Monster’s Ball, Mosaic Theater, and has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. https://fargotbakhi.com/ Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/_xVod_w964A Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

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 --------------------------------------------------------- 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

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 --------------------------------------------------------- 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

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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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