You are listening to Social Movements Lab hosted by Michael Hardt & Sandro Mezzadra. To kick off the new season, Michael and Sandro speak with Paola Rivetti and Frieda Afary, navigating the social crises in Iran undergirding the upheaval known as the Woman Life Freedom struggle. 

Social Movements Lab is brought to you by Red May in coordination with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, Dinamopress, and EuroNomade.

Sean and Kyle talk with Lainie Cassel about her time as an independent journalist in Venezuela during the Bolivarian Revolution. We dig into what it felt like to be at the reelection of Chavez, how western media portrayed the Bolivarian Revolution, and how to become a journalist. Kyle also draws heavily from Naomi Schiller’s book, Channeling The State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela.

Aside from her journalistic work, which can be found on her YouTube Channel, Lainie is also a Nutritional Therapist Practitioner and Strength Coach. You can find her on her website and Instagram

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Kyle and Sean talk with Idris Robinson about the realities of pain in cycles of crisis and struggle as well as the notion of destitution. This is followed by a 2020 recording of an early draft of Robinson's forthcoming essay "the Destituent Urge" given in Olympia, WA.

Idris Robinson is, among other things, a philosopher and writer living in Texas. 

On Pain 

The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World has to Offer 

Letter to Michael Reinoehl 

How It Might Should Be Done 

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Sean talks with Elle Herman about the varieties and modalities of fascism and the carceral dynamics at stake in the institution of criminal prosecution. Elle recently gave a talk for the Karasu Philosophical Society in Albuquerque titled "The Problem of Prosecuting Fascism." In the talk, she focuses on two recent prosecutions of notorious 2020 American vigilantes: Kyle Rittenhouse's trial for fatally shooting Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum and non-fatal shooting of Gaige Grosskreutz at the Jacob Blake protests in Kenosha, WI; and the trial of the McMichaels and William Bryan for the pursuit and murder of Ahmaud Arbery around Brunswick, GA.

On Monday, the McMichaels were each sentenced to life in prison +, while Bryan received a sentence to serve 35 years. While Sean interviewed Elle last week, the problems she approaches in her talk are all the more significant to consider in light of these sentencings. Listen to our brief interview at the beginning followed by a recording of Elle Herman's talk, "The Problem of Prosecuting Fascism," from earlier this year.

Elle Herman is, among other things, a union and labor organizer and doctoral student at UNM. 

We will release a video of this talk in the next couple of weeks. Special thanks to Idris Robinson and the Karasu Philosophical Society for sending us a recording of this talk.

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Andrew Anastasi joins Kyle and Sean for Cinder Bloc to discuss class antagonism, political dynamics, and the (prophetic) theoretical lens of the young Mario Tronti. Andrew talks about the European and Italian preconditions that led Tronti, and those that would compose the intellectual base of the Operaismo movements, toward new communist horizons and understandings of the complex momentum of class in the party (and partisan) dynamic.

Andrew Anastasi is, among other things, a sociologist, translator, writer, and editor with Viewpoint Magazine. Andrew compiled and edited the early writings of Italian communist Mario Tronti. The Weapon of Organization: Mario Tronti’s Political Revolution in Marxism can be picked up at Common Notions.

A Betrayal Retrieved 

The Autonomy of the Political 

The Young Mario Tronti Dossier 

A Not Merely Charitable Alliance: Anti-Poverty Workers Within and Against the State 

Crisis Maneuvers

Our Theorist of Outrage: Memories of Stanley Aronowitz (1933-2021) 

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Ashley Bohrer and Michael Beyea Reagan join Kyle and Sean for Cinder Bloc today. They discuss Intersectionality as a theoretical lens, how it becomes synthesized and integrated into social movements, into political struggles, and they drill down into the complex dynamics of domination, that the real, human History of class antagonism under colonialism and capitalism is simultaneously the condition of being racialized, being gendered, being aged, being able-ized, being classed.

Ashley Bohrer (Chicago) is, among other things, an activist-scholar, philosopher, and the author of Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism

Marxism and Intersectionality: An Interview [Salvage]

Gender Policing the Poor: Toward a Conceptual Apparatus

Toward a Decolonial Feminist Anticapitalism

Just Wars of Accumulation: The Salamanca School, Race and Colonial Capitalism

The Abject Atlantic: The Coloniality of the Concept of “Europe” in its Maritime Meridien

Pedagogies for Peace podcast

Ashley’s website

Michael Beyea Reagan (Seattle) is, among other things, a historian, teacher, activist, and the author of Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice

Intersectional Class Struggle: From Shared Oppression to Unified Resistance

Intersectional Class Struggle Interview [Industrial Worker]

Intersectional Class Struggle: To Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time [Last Born in the Wilderness Interview]

Electoral Folly

The Labor Costs of Dual Enrollment Programs

Michael’s website

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Today Kyle and Sean are joined by friends at Charles Kerr Publishing and The Antifada Podcast to bring you a special interview with Chuang, an anonymous, international research group composing a new analysis of the formal and historical development of China. Chuang has just released a much anticipated collection of essays focusing on the 'China experience' of the covid-19 pandemic and its convergent crises. The book, Social Contagion and other material on microbiological class war in China, is out now with Charles Kerr Publishing Co. and available at akpress.

show notes:

Chuang essays from the episode

Sorghum and Steel 

Red Dust 

Welcome to the Frontlines: Beyond Violence and Nonviolence 

A State Adequate to the Task: Conversations with Lao Xie 

Social Contagion (essay) 

Workers Organising Under the Pandemic: Reflections from China 

other references:

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's Anarchism and the Black Revolution 

Fang Fang a year after the Wuhan Diaries here and here 

for Hu Shih on China, modernization, and America see volume 3 of his English writings

for Marx on Communism, Naturalism, and Humanism, see in particular "Private Property and Communism" in the 1844 Manuscripts.

Check out the Charles Kerr Publishing revival and listen to History Against Misery

Listen to Antifada's podcast over at their patreon and join them live on twitch

Our stellar theme song, Cosmic Background Radiation, was composed by Occult A/V. Check out more over on bandcamp.

Welcome to season 2 of Cinder Bloc. radio! Today, Will and Kyle speak with Max Fox, Madeline Lane-McKinley, and M.E. O'Brien about the life and work of the late Christopher Chitty. Marrying Marx and Foucault, Chitty's analysis focused on the historical conditions for queer sexuality through the development of capitalism, focusing on relations and practices of solidarity and domination brought about through proletarianization and organizational hierarchy in periods of capitalist crises. Chitty sees the genesis and entrenchment of modern, queer sexualities as having

"... emerged within the interstices of transformed property relations, through the population displacements from the countryside and the subsequent concentration of those workers who were superfluous to agrarian production in urban centers, as well as within the institutions that attempted to manage or capture these surplus populations- factories, workhouses, standing armies, policing, and punitive apparatuses, naval and merchant fleets, and colonial territories."

A collection of Chitty's writing, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, was released by DUP in 2020. Max Fox edited the collection and is currently working on a second volume of Chitty's writing with Madeline Lane-McKinley.

* At the time of this recording all the way up until our release, workers of Duke University Press have been in a collective bargaining struggle and unionizing against their working conditions with the press management. Listeners can find out more here: https://www.dupworkersunion.org/ *

Max Fox is, among other things, a founding editor of Pinko Magazine, an editor and translator.

On Christopher Chitty 

Mourning and Marginalia: an Interview with Madeline Lane-McKinley 

a Final Straw interview on Sexual Hegemony, sexuality, liberation and class.  

a Rabbles of the World interview on sexual liberation and its legacies 

Sexual Hegemony book launch (w/ Chris Nealon and Tobi Haslett) 

An Infantile Disorder 

Madeline Lane-McKinley is, among other things, a writer and a founding editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.

Mourning and Marginalia: An Interview with Max Fox 

"Retreat" and the Sick World 

The Year of the Wombat 

Dear Z 

Feeling Good in 'Feel Good' 

Born in Flames: Fictions of Masculinity, After #MeToo 

The Idea of Children 

And We Mother Them Again: Motherhood at the Margins

Red May organizer Will McKeithen is joined by Da'Shaun Harrison and Caleb Luna to discuss the systemic violence of anti-fatness; its role in unevenly distributing care under racial capitalism; and how leftist social and political movements might build fatter forms of collective liberation.
show notes:

Da’Shaun Harrison is, among many other things, the author of the forthcoming book The Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness from Penguin Random House. You can see more of their work at www.dashaunharrison.com, at www.wearyourvoicemag.com where they work as managing editor, and on Twitter and Instagram @dashaunlh. 

Caleb Luna is, among other things, the author of multiple works which you can read on thebodyisnotanapology, on blackgirldangerous, and at their website at www.caleb-luna.com. You can also follow them on Twitter @chairbreak_ and on Instagram @chairbreaker.

Special thanks to Stephen Steen for his help producing this episode

Many thanks to Occult A/V for our new title intro song, "Cosmic Background Radiation" 

With Red May 5 only a few weeks away, we will be sharing a ton of previous Red May interviews and talks, Social Movement Lab discussions, and new Cinder Bloc. episodes.  

Last week on Cinder Bloc. we presented a discussion we had with Annie McClanahan and Jason E. Smith around the shifting terrain of economic productivity in the US, the historical factors pushing labor toward service sector work, gigification, and how these conditions transform social struggles today. 

This week, we are doubling down for our E. Smithians in the crowd. In February, we hosted a local discussion where Red May founder Philip Wohlstetter interviewed Jason about his book Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation, out through the Brooklyn Rail's Field Notes series with Reaktion Books. The event was a digital roundtable hosted by our local bibli-oasis Elliott Bay Book Company. 

If you enjoy this conversation, check out more of our programming at www.youtube.com/RedMayTV, and consider donating via www.patreon.com/redmayseattle. Red May is entirely run on volunteer labor and the generosity of donors like you.

For more go to www.redmayseattle.org