Radicals in Conversation

Democratic Living in Times of Fascism

With H. L. T. Quan and Dylan Rodríguez.

This is the final installment of our three-part mini series, 'Beyond the Ballot Box', which explores some of the major political currents in US politics today.

Chris Browne and James Kelly are joined by H. L. T. Quan and Dylan Rodríguez for a conversation about life in times of fascism. We explore concepts such as state addiction, anti-democracy, ungovernability and democratic living. We also touch on the work of Cedric Robinson, and what we can learn from Black abolition feminist praxis.

Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living is out now. Podcast listeners can get 40% off the book on plutobooks.com using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

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H. L. T. Quan is a political theorist and an award-winning filmmaker. She is an Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Quan is the author of Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World and editor of Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator based at the University of California-Riverside, where he works in the Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of a number of books including White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide, which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Tenant Unions Fighting the Housing Crisis

With Jacob Stringer.

We are joined on the show by Jacob Stringer, a housing and social movements researcher and organiser, and the author of Renters Unite: How Tenant Unions Are Fighting the Housing Crisis.

We discuss the many local and international dimensions to housing crisis in countries across the Global North. We talk about why simply building more houses isn’t enough, and explore some of the injustices experienced by renters and those in temporary accommodation. We also talk about the new wave of tenant unions, and the ways in which their tactical and strategic orientations overlap and diverge, as a result of the context in which they’re organising.

Listeners of Radicals in Conversation can get 40% off the book on plutobooks.com. Enter the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

Billionaires and Guillotines: The Board Game

With Max Haiven.

In this special episode of Radicals in Conversation, we take a first look at the new board game, Billionaires & Guillotines, in which players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose … a lot more than their assets.

Chris Browne is joined on the show by Max Haiven, the game's designer, for a conversation about its origins, development and gameplay. We also discuss the ways in which board games can play an important role in political education, and provide a much-needed space for connection and conviviality.

Back the project on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plutopress/billionaires-and-guillotines

Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7

With Nicholas Mirzoeff. 

Content Warning: Sexual abuse

In this episode we discuss the new book, To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7.

Nicholas Mirzoeff shares how experiences of domestic, political and sexual violence - in both his family history and his own childhood - have shaped his understanding of events since October 7th. He talks about what it means to identify as an anti-Zionist Jew in the current moment, and how we can find new anticolonial ways of seeing that reject the drone’s-eye-view of ‘white sight’. We also discuss the evolving visual politics of Palestine solidarity, from watermelon emojis and AI-generated images, to the torn canvas of a portrait of Arthur Balfour.

Podcast listeners can get 40% off the book on plutobooks.com, using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

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Among the founders of visual culture as a field, Nicholas Mirzoeff has also written extensively on Jewishness and Palestine. His books include How To See The World, The Right to Look and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. He has written for the Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Nation. He lives in New York City.

Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities

With Alan Sears.

In this episode we discuss the new book, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities.

Alan Sears lays out his expansive understanding of key ideas like labour, alienation, social reproduction, and eroticism. We discuss 'erotic enclosure' in 19th century industrial capitalism, bodily discipline and identity formation at work and in school; how state social policy has shifted, balancing the constraint and unleashing of desire, and forged hegemonic, heteronormative (and homonormative) gender regimes. We also look at nature and ecology, and what science fiction can offer us as we think through more revolutionary possibilities and practices around gender and sexuality.

Podcast listeners can get 40% off the book on plutobooks.com, using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

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Alan Sears is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has been writing about queer Marxism for activist and scholarly audiences since the mid-1980s. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left: A History of the Future. Alan resides in Toronto, Ontario.

Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

With Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift.

In our first episode of 2025, we discuss the themes of the new book, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.

We talk about what is entailed by trans and femme practices, the value of critical theory, and how trans liberation moves beyond the liberal call for rights. We discuss solidarity, abolitionism, and why it’s vital to sit with and work through complicity and friction within our movements.

Podcast listeners can get 40% off the book on plutobooks.com, using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

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Nat Raha is a poet and Lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. She contributed to the collection Transgender Marxism. She has authored books of poetry, journal articles, and her writing has been translated into eight languages. She edits Radical Transfeminism zine.

Mijke van der Drift is Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Mijke's work on ethics has appeared in various formats in journals, performances, and sound pieces. Mijke edits Radical Transfeminism zine.

Radicals in Conversation: 2024 Curated Highlights

Our 2024 roundup features curated highlights from episodes released throughout the year:

We speak to John Pring, about the British government’s Department for Work and Pensions, and its horrific work capability assessment. We speak to Robert Chapman, about why the neurodiversity movement emerged when it did, its successes, and the limitations of a liberal orientation under neoliberal capitalism. We speak to Rafeef Ziadah, Riya Al'Sanah and Katy Fox-Hoddess about international labour solidarity with Palestine, and the need to try and organise with workers inside the factories that are producing weapons bound for Israel. We also speak to Kalonji Jama Changa and Joy James about 'Cop Cities', and why the militarisation of policing necessitates a cognitive and strategic shift within our movements.

All the books featured on the show in 2024 are 40% off through plutobooks.com until the end of the year - use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

You can browse the full list of eligible books at: plutobooks.com/podcastreading.

Beyond the Ballot Box: Pacification and Intergenerational Memory in Social Movements

With Peter Gelderloos and Vicky Osterweil.

Whether it is in the fight against police violence, ecological destruction, or any other manifestation of patriarchal white supremacy, time and again, the hard-earned lessons of past struggles seem to get forgotten. Our social movements are capable of generating significant momentum, moments of far-reaching revolt, but we suffer from a kind of amnesia - an inability to pass on lessons learned from one generation to the next. And so each new wave of activism starts from scratch, disconnected from the strategies, successes, and failures of those that came before.

In this episode, we discuss the strategic imposition of nonviolence and other pacification techniques used by the state. We talk about revolutionary imagination, mutual aid, and what gets left out of official histories of struggle, from the Civil Rights era to the George Floyd uprisings. We discuss the need to make space for both joy and grief in our movements, and the importance of physical place to building collective memory.

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Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation.

Vicky Osterweil is a writer, worker and agitator based in Philadelphia. She is the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (Bold Type Books) and an upcoming book about Intellectual Property and the corporate domination of culture, The Extended Universe, which is due to be published by Haymarket in 2025.

Western Complicity and the Human Cost of the Arms Trade in Gaza

With Ahmed Alnaouq, Andrew Feinstein and Anna Stavrianakis. 

It has now been over a year since Israel embarked on its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured. Furnishing Israel with more than just diplomatic cover, Western governments have kept up a steady supply of military aid and equipment, actively enabling the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Our governments' complicity cannot be ignored or overstated. 

At the heart of questions around how and why Britain and the US are continuing to arm Israel lies the international arms trade. Thinking more about how this corrupting, deadly industry operates, and how we might resist it, is vital - something that Palestinians understand only too well: one year ago, Palestinian trade unions reiterated their urgent global call to action, imploring workers across the world to halt the sale of weapons to Israel.

We are joined on the show by Ahmed Alnaouq, Andrew Feinstein and Anna Stavrianakis, to discuss how weapons sales to Israel function as a direct expression of state policy; how the arms industry corrupts our own democratic political processes; and the socio-economic opportunity cost of our governments' commitment to militarism. We also talk about the direct impact these weapons have had on life in Gaza, long before October 7th 2023; and the work that We Are Not Numbers is doing to give young Palestinians agency through sharing their stories.

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Ahmed Alnaouq is a former Palestinian diplomat who served in the Palestinian Mission to the UK. He is the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, which empowers Palestinian youth to share their stories globally. Ahmed holds a masters degree in International Journalism from Leeds University, and his work has been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, the New Arab, and Gulf News.

Andrew Feinstein is the executive director of Shadow World Investigations. Andrew resigned as an African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament in South Africa in 2001, in protest at the government’s refusal to investigate corruption in a $10 billion arms deal. His first book, After the Party, reveals the impact of this deal. He also wrote the critically acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, and worked on an award-winning feature documentary, Shadow World.

Anna Stavrianakis is director of research and strategy at Shadow World Investigations, and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

Ahmed, Andrew and Anna are all contributors to the new book, Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It, which is available now from Pluto Press.

Resisting Cop Cities and the Militarization of Policing

What happens when the police become an army? Since 1997, the US Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2bn in military equipment to law enforcement agencies. This militarization has, unsurprisingly, been shown to unjustly impact on Black communities and is associated with increased killings by police.

The Police Public Safety Training Center in Atlanta - more commonly known as 'Cop City' - is just the latest manifestation of the militarization of policing. It is a costly and controversial endeavor, being forced through by the local Democrat-run administration, in the face of widespread opposition among local communities. Resistance to the project has been met with spurious legal roadblocks, activist intimidation and violent repression.

But Cop City is far from being just a local issue; almost every US state now has a Cop City project of their own in some stage of development, and the logic, structures and ramifications of Cop Cities are truly international.

In this episode we are joined by Liliana, Joy James and Kalonji Changa to discuss the history of Cop Cities, the parallels with the notorious School of the Americas, and the ways in which the tactics and logic of US imperialism abroad are being brought to bear on working class and racialized communities at home.

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Liliana is an immigrant from Colombia based in Houston, Texas. She is an abolitionist and has worked directly with prisoners on death row and their families. She is the co-host of the radio show 'Voz de La Tierra' on KPFT Pacifica, discussing the geopolitical effects of militarism, policing, imperialism, and racism on Indigenous, Black, and immigrant colonized communities across the globe. 

Joy James is an organizer and author. Her recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. She is the editor of Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons, and the forthcoming ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures. Joy also works with the Guerrilla Intellectual University (GIU) podcast collective on Black Power Media (BPM).

Kalonji Jama Changa is an organizer and founder of the FTP Movement. He is the author of How to Build a People's Army and co-producer of the documentary Organizing Is the New Cool. Kalonji is founder of Black Power Media and serves as co-chair of the Urban Survival and Preparedness Institute.