Cosmopod

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.

Parker and Matthew sit down with sociologist and labor activist Yueran Zhang to discuss workers' struggles in contemporary China. Topics discussed include public memory of Tiananmen Square, the Chongqing model, trade unionism and labor activism in the Pearl River Delta, the Jasic workers' struggle, and prospects for the revolutionary left.

------

Check out Yueran's articles on The Forgotten Socialists of Tiananmen Square and Leninists in a Chinese Factory

Alex, Rudy and Christian sit down to discuss the history of the German Democratic Republic from its foundation atop the ruins of WW2 to the prelude of reunification. They discuss the challenges of building socialism in the fourth of ruined country, the challenges of brain drain, the economy before and after the Wall was built, the intelligentsia/worker divide, the varying responsiveness of the ruling party to criticism and how the GDR was able to provide a normal life to most of its population for decades.

Main References:

The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker - Mary Fulbrook

A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee - Victor Grossman

The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany - Ned Richardson-Little

Complementary references:

The Making of the GDR, 1945-53 - Gareth Pritchard

Where was the Working Class?: Revolution in Eastern Germany - Linda Fuller

Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of Eastern Germany - Charles S. Maier

Jonah Martell proposes a radical New Union Act to throw the antiquated US Constitution into the dustbin of history. Cliff Connolly reads the article out loud.