Annie and Rudy join Greg Afinogenov from Stomp Out Slumlords for a discussion on tenants unions, and how SoS has thought about the work of Cloward and Piven to develop ideas on how to build sustainable mass organisations. We discuss how to build mass constituencies for actions and what the goal of tenants unionism should be.

Further reading: R. A. Cloward, F. F. Piven - Disruptive Dissensus: People and Power in the Industrial Age

Stomp Out Slumlords's organizing report of February 2021

This is a narration of the second chapter of Lars Lih's excellent book Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. In this chapter, Lih examines all the programmatic writings from Lenin in the 1890s and demonstrates the revolutionary leader's consistency throughout this time. This sets the stage for Lenin's later polemics at the start of the 20th century, including What Is to Be Done?

Christian and Connor sit down with Helen Yaffe to discuss her book We Are Cuba. We talked about the history and political economy of revolutionary Cuba before and after the post-Soviet period. Some of topics we touched on were the nature of democracy on the island, the relationship of Cuba to the United States, and how Cuba has dealt with the pandemic and coming crisis of climate change.

Other resources mentioned:

Emily Morris - Unexpected Cuba

The documentary Cuba & COVID 19 Public Health, Science and Solidarity and Helen's article on Cuban vaccines.

Piero Gleijeses' work on Cuba, in particular Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 and Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959–1976.

Amelia Davenport joins Samuel Bowles for a short discussion on his life-long research on global poverty and education. They discuss Bowles's history and how this led to his orientation, his work on education "Schooling in Capitalist America", including what he has changed his mind on, his thoughts about markets, incentives, central planning and capitalist economies, as well as other theories such as the value-form abolition, neo-liberal economics. He also talks about teaching economics to undergraduates and what thinkers socialists should engage with even if they're outside the Marxist tradition.

Make sure to check out the CORE project and their completely free undergraduate level coursebook on economics.

Rudy joins Zama and Jonathan from Amazonians United to discuss their shop floor alternative which has organized walkouts in Chicago, and started a national fight for PTO. They discuss the way they bond with co-workers on the shop floor, what their next steps are, and how different their organizing looks like to that of RWDSU which organized the Bessemer (Alabama) unionization effort. We also discuss medium- and long-term goals, as well as how they relate to the existing socialist movement.

Destructive cults are usually considered the domain of religious movements. The Left, however, has its own track record of cults. Gus Breslauer sympathetically examines this history in search of the political questions that produce such groups, how they operate, and how to overcome them. Robert Fish reads the article out loud.

Roger and Rudy join Frank Bardacke, author of Trampling out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers for a discussion on the UFW, its history, its tactics, its structure and its slow loss of relevance. We focus on the boycott as a tactic: how the UFW pioneered the use of boycotts, how winning the 1965-70 Delano grape campaign through a boycott shifted the power in the union from workers to staffers, and how both tactics, and what they represented in the union, would come into conflict in the 1979 Salinas Lettuce struggle. We also talk about Cesar Chavez the man, the UFW's changing relationship to undocumented migrants, present-day farm organizing and what lessons we can draw from the UFW for today, in particular on the use of boycotts and on union democracy.