May Day Amid A Plague w/ Sarah Jaffe

May Day Amid A Plague with Sarah Jaffe Full Audio & Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/sarahjaffe [edited for clarity, May 1, 2020]

Laborwave Radio in conversation with Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

She discusses labor organizing and worker militancy amid a plague on this troubled day of celebration, May Day.

Preface “We already know, because of the climate catastrophe that is breathing down on us, that we need to radically reshape the economy and do it quickly. Well now we've seen that we can. It turns out that we can survive on the work of so-called essential workers. I think what we’re seeing is the things that are staying open right now, the things that we need, are jobs doing the work of social reproduction. Nurses are working, and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are picking tomatoes in Florida working. The people who deliver things to you, the logistics chain, Amazon warehouse workers who have been showing us all how to be militant lately, are working. That is social reproduction work. So much of the rest of the economy doesn't actually need to exist.”

Towards a Queer Marxist Future with Holly Lewis

Transcript available here.

We speak with Holly Lewis, assistant professor at Texas State University and author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection published by Zed Books.

The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy.

Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.

Boots Riley on Power, Art, and the Radical Dr. King

Full Transcript Available Here.

Laborwave Radio presents a reproduction of audio from a live discussion between Boots Riley and Andrea Haverkamp. The event was organized by the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE 6069) and King Legacy Advisory Board (KLAB) to honor the legacy of the radical Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and the 20th Anniversary of CGE.

“Even for us as organizers the nature of power under capitalism has been obscured. We’ve been told, for any of you who are old enough to have been around during the anti-Iraq War invasion protests of the early 2000s, people would say ‘if we could just get millions into the streets then we’ll be able to stop this war.’ And we did, we got millions of people into the streets at the same time on the same day all around the world- didn’t stop the war. Because that’s not how power works. Power doesn’t just get shamed into doing the right thing.”

#cge6069 #bootsriley #sorrytobotheryou #wayfairstrike