Jeff Schuhrke on his book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. During the Cold War, organized labor’s top leadership acted as an agent of the US national security state abroad: undermining left-wing unions, fomenting right-wing coups, and promoting the US-led capitalist order. At home, those same forces destroyed left-wing unions and organizers. That history goes a long way in explaining the weakened, conservative, and ineffectual workers’ movement we still confront today.

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Featuring more analysis from Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on the shape of global geopolitics and geoeconomics. We discuss: the fault lines of the green energy transition; the US and China battle for dominance while the rest of the world seeks advantage and opportunities for leverage; the US and Russia’s full-throttle commitment to fossil capitalism; the IMF’s ongoing imposition of neoliberal austerity on the world’s poorest countries, which, in opposition to these plans, want to remake the entire world capitalist system. Plus: Why the economic weapon failed against China and Russia, and a lot more.

The second in a two-part series.

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Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis

Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552

Transnational Institute reports:

Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism

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Featuring Ilias Alami and Tim Sahay on a global conjuncture defined by Washington’s shredding of the liberal international order’s legitimacy amid a panic over decline: the escalating Cold War with China; Gaza genocide; Trump’s tariff wars and militarism, and his pivot toward Putin on Ukraine; European defense buildup and fiscal revolution; what this all means for the poor majority of the Global South, and more. Part one of a two-part series.

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Subscribe to The Polycrisis newsletter phenomenalworld.org/series/the-polycrisis

Download a free copy of The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon academic.oup.com/book/57552

Transnational Institute reports:

Geopolitics of Capitalism: State of Power 2025 tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism

Buy Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal at Haymarketbooks.com

Buy Nuclear Is Not The Solution at Versobooks.com

Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant.

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Defend federal workers and federal services: actionnetwork.org/forms/let-us-work/

Contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) for help organizing your workplace: workerorganizing.org

Contact Workers Organizing Workers (WOW) if you are interested in taking a job in a strategic industry to unionize it: form.jotform.com/250337473301045

Buy All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence at Haymarketbooks.com

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Featuring TrueAnon hosts Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on our freakish and reactionary tech oligarchy. Musk and friends built a technological infrastructure that has warped everyone’s minds, including their own. Now they’re seizing the state.

The hideous AI “art” we discuss:

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Featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke; the complicity of bankrupt liberal identity politics; and the centrality of various oppressions to the class domination of capital and struggles against it.

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Read Mike’s article “The Problem of Class Abstractionism” epublications.marquette.edu/socs_fac/356

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Featuring Danielle Carr on the history and present state of American unwellness and how that’s been shaped by psychiatry, prescription drugs, neuroscience, popular culture, smartphones and social media. We trace the rise of psychiatry as a Gilded Age human science, the disastrous contradictions of asylum deinstitutionalization, the invention of neuroscience and deep brain stimulation, Elon Musk’s Neuralink fraudulence, how Adderall made the Internet run, the liberal gospel of traumatic literalism recounted in The Body Keeps the Score, and the scientific Bonapartism of RFK Jr.’s medical freedom movement.

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Buy Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal at Haymarketbooks.com

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Featuring Chris Newman on Trump’s far-right anti-migrant agenda and Democrats’ cruel and stupid complicity.

Read All-American Nativism versobooks.com/products/704-all-american-nativism

Read Dan’s essay on Gaza and migration politics in n+1 nplusonemag.com/issue-48/politics/do-border

Trump’s immigration executive orders propublica.org/article/donald-trump-immigration-executive-orders

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Buy After Accountability at Haymarketbooks.com

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Featuring Hannah Srajer on building tenant unions by applying labor organizing models. The Connecticut Tenants Union is partnered with SEIU 1199NE to organize fighting super majority tenant unions that win collectively bargained leases and wield working class political power. It’s a model that’s spreading nationwide.

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Buy Not Your Rescue Project at Haymarketbooks.com

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Featuring Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal on their book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Tenant unions fighting to transform Los Angeles, the country, and the world.

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Buy Abolish Rent haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent

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