The Dig Folgen

Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar and activist, talks to Dan about her life, Occupy, Bernie, the Democratic Party, anti-war movements, black bloc, mass incarceration and more. (Also: Dan’s voice sounds a little different because he had to record in a different room.) Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike and Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520961715

The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As is often the case, however, the focus shifted elsewhere soon after disturbances in the street came to end. Political scientist @LesterSpence recently wrote an article about why children were freezing in Baltimore public schools: the heating didn’t work, something that can only be made sense of when viewed in the longer history of capital flight, racial and class segregation, and the rise of a service-economy carceral state jacobinmag.com/2018/01/baltimore-freezing-schools-children-racism-austerity Thanks to Verso for their support. Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig            

We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country, and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer (@pfrymer), a professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, he provides a close study of the empire America built in the late 18th and 19th century, a project of geographic expansion facilitated and also limited by the demands of racial engineering. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike And from University of California Press: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296145