In this episode Josh interviews Amba Guerguerian and Harry to discuss the New York War Crimes project and their efforts to get people to Boycott, Divest, and Unsubscribe from the New York Times.

Amba Guerguerian is an associate editor at The Indypendent  and a contributor at The New York War Crimes. 

Harry is a writer, educator and organizer with Writers against the War on Gaza and a contributor at The New York War Crimes. 

The New York War Crimes is a project dedicated to de legitimizing the imperial mouthpiece that is The New York Times through focused contemporary and historical critique, while providing an alternative platform for Palestinian and Arab authors, poets and artists — precisely what you won’t find in the pages of The Times.

If you would like to support our work the best way to do so as always is to become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We are also still working to increase our subscriber base over on the YouTube channel so subscribing to that feed is another great way. We have four, possible five live episodes coming this upcoming week so make sure you are subscribed there or on patreon to catch all of that content.

This episode was recorded on March 31, 2024

This episode was co-edited/produced by Aidan Elias and Jared Ware

Music is provided as always by Televangel

Links:

The New York War Crimes

The Indypendent

Writers Against the War on Gaza

U.S. Media Control and October 7th with Bryce Greene

Electronic Intifada

Mondoweiss

The Anti-Empire Project with Justin Podour

MAKC YouTube Channel

In this episode Abdaljawad (Abboud) Omar returns to the show. 

This is the lightly edited audio from a livestream we recorded on March 24th 

Abdaljawad Omar is a writer, analyst, and lecturer based in Ramallah, Palestine. He currently lectures in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. He has written extensively in Arabic. In English Abboud has contributed to Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and Ebb Magazine among other outlets.

We discuss his essay "Bleeding Forms: Beyond the Intifada," which is available open access through Duke University press.

We will also talk about recent developments in the US-co-authored zionist genocidal war on Palestinians. Although we would note that because this was recorded a little over a week ago, a few of my comments are not totally current to the most recent developments, but the analysis remains quite relevant nonetheless.

We discuss some of the recent developments from the Palestinian resistance which continues to maintain a heroic resistance against the zionist occupation’s forces. And of course we touch on the siege on Al Shifa hospital, the full extent of which we revealed yesterday when the IOF retreated from the area.

This was our seventh conversation with Abdaljawad Omar since November. Previously we have released a couple of them as audio podcasts, but there are still 4 others that have not been converted yet and all of them are up on a playlist on our Youtube channel that we’ll link in the show notes:

Also want to note that since October 7th we’ve also had a few conversations with Dr. Lara Sheehi discussing recent developments from a decolonial psychoanalytic perspective. And we also have created a playlist for those. 

In addition some of our recent guests on the Youtube feed include Steven Salaita, Within Our Lifetime, Decolonize Palestine, Celeste Winston, Matteo Capasso, Hanif Abdurraqib, Dylan Rodríguez, and more.

We also have three more livestreams prepared for this coming week so remember to subscribe to the Youtube channel, turn on notifications and catch those.

We do also have another study group starting up. This time on Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear. This will start on April 17th at 7:30 PM ET. This study group is available for all patrons of the show. To gain access to that or just to support our work, become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Livestream conversations with Abdaljawad Omar

Livestream conversations with Lara Sheei (including one with Stephen Sheehi as well)

In this conversation we welcome Eugene Puryear back to the podcast to talk about the recently published book The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader which was compiled by The Black Belt Thesis Study Group and features a foreword by Eugene Puryear.

The reader itself was published by 1804 Books, and they have published a lot of really good stuff recently that I just want to take a moment to shout-out. They recently along with the Palestinian Youth Movement translated and published The Trinity of Fundamentals which hopefully we will be hosting a conversation on at some point soon. They also recently published a translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine and of course the collection of Hugo Chavez’s speeches that we discussed with Manolo de los Santos last year and much more. So I just say that to say if you go pick this book up from them, that there is a bunch of really good stuff you can grab while you’re there.

Eugene Puryear is a journalist, activist, politician, and host on Breakthrough News. He is a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and is the author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America.

In this discussion we ask Eugene to contextualize the origins of the Black Belt thesis, to discuss some of the articulations and development of the thesis as undertaken by Comintern and the CPUSA. We discuss some of the organizing implications of it, its role in the development of the US communist movement particularly with regards to Black people, and the challenging of the problem of white racism as it exists within the history of the US left and white workers as well. Also Eugene discusses the centrality of national oppression within the political economy of US capitalism. 

Along the way we talk about some of the contributions from figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Haywood, Louis Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones and others. 

A couple of other things I want to highlight is that we have been hosting a lot of conversations over on our YouTube page recently the majority of which we have not released as audio episodes. We will link that in the show notes, but also you can just find it by searching Millennials Are Killing Capitalism on YouTube. 

The other thing I want to note is we do have another round of our study group starting back up. For this cycle we will be reading Orisanmi Burton’s amazing book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt. I can’t wait to read that text and discuss it with folks so sign up for that if you’re interested it will be on Wednesday nights at 7:30 PM ET starting on April 17th it is for patrons of the show and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And as always the best way to support our work is to become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism on YouTube

Tip of the Spear Reading Group (for patrons)

Credits:

This episode is co-hosted by Joshua Briond and Jared Ware. It is co-produced by Aidan Elias and Jared Ware. Our guest for this episode is Eugene Puryear. Our music is from Televangel.

In this episode we interview Tammy Kovich and El Jones to discuss the book Antifascism Against Machismo

Published by our good friends at Kersplebedeb, and described as 

“An intergenerational dialogue on the meaning of feminist antifascism.

Anti-Fascism Against Machismo collects and continues a conversation begun by Tammy Kovich (as “Petronella Lee”) in 2019. Four feminist, antifascist revolutionaries jump off from each other’s reflections and bring the particularities of their varied contexts to bear on one central problem: What has and will a women’s war against fascism look like?”

We pick up this conversation with Tammy Kovich who wrote the original zine upon which the book is constructed as well as El Jones who wrote the introduction. The book itself also includes contributions from Veronica L and from the late great Butch Lee who became an ancestor in 2021, and who we all spend time honoring in this conversation.

Among other things we discuss different variants of fascist or far right patriarchy and misogyny, the problems of the politics of representation and neocolonialism, and histories of the resistance of women in antifascist movements including in Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, and Spain.

I will add that we recorded this conversation back in August, and I am sure that if we had recorded it after October 7th we would have talked about what an antifascist war against zionism might look like and the contributions of women and children in the Palestinian struggle against genocide.

We very much appreciated this book and encourage folks to pick it up from Kersplebedeb’s retail arm which is leftwingbooks.net/. It is currently 40% off for the month of March along with over 400 titles at their online bookstore.

If you appreciate the work that we do, becoming a patron of the show or increasing your pledge to the show if you can afford to do so, are the most meaningful ways you can help us keep it going. We would not be able to bring you these episodes on a weekly basis and the livestreams we put out multiple times per week without the support of our listeners. We also will be starting a new study group in April and the best place for you to find out more about that and track everything we release is to become a patron for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

In this conversation we talk to Zeyad el Nabolsy about two of his recent pieces on Marxism-Leninism in the East African context. One piece is entitled, “Lenin in East Africa: Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu and Dani Wadada Nabudere” from The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century  and the other is “Questions from the Dar es Salaam Debates” which is in the book Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story which was recently released from Pluto Press.

Zeyad El Nabolsy is an Assistant Professor at York University, he has written extensively on African philosophy, and we hope to have many more conversations with him in the future. I will note as a caveat again that this is one of the conversations that we recorded prior to October 7th so if it feels like Palestine, or the Congo or Haiti or Sudan or even more discussion on Fanon might be meaningful for us to engage with in this discussion given recent events, there is a reason that we do not and that the context that we do discuss in passing are the anticolonial coup d’etats in West Africa. 

Zeyad has done some interesting work on Edward Said and some work on western philosophy and Islam so hopefully we can have another conversation with him soon that is able to weave together some more current events with his historical and philosophical research interests. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting discussion and highlights some East African Marxists that we should be more familiar with given the importance of their thought and their political formulations, but who are often not well known outside of circles who are more knowledgeable about African Marxism or African Marxism-Leninism.

In this discussion we do talk about East African-Marxism Leninism, Pan Africanism, African Socialism, and the famous Dar Es Salaam Debates. We also talk about Dani Nabudere’s work on imperialism, taking Lenin’s theory of imperialism and updating and applying it to the African context. There’s much more to say, but we’ll leave for the conversation itself.

As always to support our work become a patron of the show. It’s the best way you can ensure that we’re able to continue bringing you livestreams which we do multiple times each week on our YouTube page, that we are able to bring you podcast episodes, and of course our study groups as well. You can support us at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism for as little as $1 a month.

Aidan Elias and Jared Ware co-produced this episode.

Sources/Links:

“Lenin in East Africa: Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu and Dani Wadada Nabudere” from The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century  

“Questions from the Dar es Salaam Debates” from Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story

Zeyad El Nabolsy's PhilPapers site (where you can download free pdfs of his pieces)

For this episode we interview Ernest McMillan to discuss his memoir Standing: One Man's Odyssey During the Turbulent '60s which came out last summer. McMillan grew up in the highly segregated heart of Dallas, Texas. We talk to him about his childhood experiences within his segregated Black community, and his experiences organizing against white supremacy in Dallas and across the South with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 

McMillan’s story is one of the power of organizing, but also of fierce state repression, police raids, trumped up charges, and a j ourney to find refuge in West Africa, time in the underground, political imprisonment, and prison organizing. There are many more aspects of his life story of course, but those are some of the ones he discusses in Standing and in this episode as well.

A couple of notes, McMillan offers a few words on solidarity with Palestinians, and on the importance of this today. This conversation was recorded in September, and I say that just to underscore the long history of solidarity between SNCC members and the Palestinian Liberation struggle. If we had recorded it after October I’m sure we would’ve talked about that solidarity in more detail, but I’ll just say it’s a common thread that has come up in most of our conversations with SNCC veterans.

We do have a number of new episodes on their way soon. I apologize to the audio listeners that I have been a little busier on the video side in recent months, but Aidan Elias - who co-produced this episode - is helping to produce and release the audio content we have and more is on its way soon.

We encourage folks to pick up Ernest’s book to learn more about his life and political odyssey.

To support our work please consider contributing to our patreon. You can do so for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Other conversations we've had with SNCC veterans or about SNCC (or SNCC members) in some capacity. 

In this episode we speak to Pulitzer Prize winning composer and musician Henry Threadgill and the co-author of his autobiography Brent Hayes Edwards. The book we discuss, which was published last year is entitled Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music.

Henry Threadgill was born in Chicago in 1944. He is one of the most significant and innovative composers of the 20th and 21st Century. In addition to being an award winning composer is an amazing saxophonist and flautist. He also is known for his percussion work, in particular the invention of the hubkaphone, a marimba like instrument made out of hub caps. He has been a leader or co-leader of the bands Air, Ensemble Double UP, Make a Move, The Henry Threadgill Ensemble, The Henry Threadgill Sextett, The Situation Society Dance Band, Very Very Circus, X-75, Zooid and 14 or 15 Kestra: Agg and probably some others I didn’t track down.  If we went into all the bands and groups Henry was a part of the list would be three times as long. In recent years Threadgill has established a completely new chromatic system for musical composition outside the confines of diatonic harmony. In 2016, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for In For a Penny, In for a Pound, an album he composed for his sextet, Zooid. He currently lives in New York.

Brent Hayes Edwards is a Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

So why this episode, it’s a bit outside of most of our content here. Perhaps the closest things we’ve done to a conversation like this would be the dialogue we hosted between Fred Moten & Hanif Abdurraqib or the interview we did with Dionne Brand last year. But although I didn’t ask it directly, the guiding question that animated this interview and engagement with Henry and Brent’s book for me was: what insights might a truly revolutionary composer have for aspiring revolutionary organizers or for cultural workers seeking to maximize the revolutionary possibilities of their work? 

We hope you enjoy this conversation and that it proves as meaningful to you as it was to us. It was a tremendous honor to sit down with Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards to discuss their beautiful book which is available now everywhere.

Thank you to Aidan Elias for co-producing this episode.

If you appreciate the work that we do, as always you can support our work for as little as $1 per month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. Our podcast is fully supported by individual contributions of folks like you and we encourage you to join the amazing folks who make it possible for us to bring you these conversations on a weekly basis. 

In this episode we welcome Chris Gilbert back to the podcast to discuss his new book, Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project. 

Chris Gilbert is a professor of political studies at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela and creator and co-host of Escuela de Cuadros, a Marxist educational television program and podcast. Gilbert is co-author with Cira Pascual Marquina of Venezuela, The Present as Struggle (Monthly Review, 2020). 

We’ve hosted three previous discussions with Chris Gilbert, one related to an essay that is a chapter of this book, which discusses the theoretical work behind seeing communes as building blocks of a socialist metabolism. The two others with Cira Pascual Marquina were on the book they co-authored.

I just want to make a note, that we recorded this conversation back in September, prior to October 7th, which would’ve definitely warranted some attention in the conversation particularly as Gilbert talked about sanctions as total war and viewing Venezuela as a concentration camp, remarks that resonate with the Palestinian experience currently. This was also recorded prior to some of the recent developments in Venezuela including - among many other things - the Essequibo referendum, Biden threatening harsher sanctions against Venezuela, and the arrest of 32 people in alleged assassination plots. The best place as always to stay abreast of developments in Venezuela is to follow and support the work of venezuelanalysis.com. 

We talk about many things in this conversation, but a few I will highlight are Gilbert’s theoretical work, building on the work of feminist social reproduction theory, Marx’s theory of value, to put forth the concept of directly social labor as a key to the emancipatory possibilities of the commune. Gilbert also shares some of the contributions of African Maroon communities and indigenous communal practices to the development of Venezuela’s socialist vision.

We also talk about why for Gilbert the commune represents a recovery of Marx, in particular the romantic Marx who saw revolutionary potential among the Iroquois Confederacy, Algerian peasants and Russian peasant communes. Along the way we talk about a commune that is geographically the size of Manhattan and discuss currency experiments, communal banking efforts, and the process of “de-alienation” that Gilbert sees in the commune.

The book is out now from Monthly Review press, I highly recommend it, it was one of our favorite books that we read in 2023. 

And if you like what we do please support us at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We do have a study group that starts for patrons tomorrow night at 7:30 PM ET on February 8th studying the counterinsurgency manual, so this is a final call for anyone interested in joining us for that.

Links:

Purchase the book from Monthly Review Press.

Previous conversation on a chapter in this book

Part 1 & Part 2 of our discussion with Chris and Cira

Aidan Elias co-produced this episode.

For this episode I’m joined by Haydar of The Resistance Report which is a podcast that was launched after October 7th by a Palestinian news organization known as the Al Falasteniyeh Media Network or AFMN.

In this discussion we talk to Haydar about AFMN, their approach, their media work including The Resistance Report, and their efforts to uplift the analyses of Palestinians from Palestine to those in the diaspora. We talk a little bit about their analysis of the resistance’s position and of the unfolding genocidal depravity of the zionist occupation in Palestine. We talk about the suppression of AFMN as an outlet which has attempted to set up offices and develop correspondents in Gaza. We also get into a little bit of a discussion of episode four of theirs which is entitled Al-Araj’s Echo, Guiding Modern Resistance, which highlights the life and contributions of Bassel al-Araj to the Palestinian Resistance.

We encourage folks to check out their work for yourselves and if you like what they’re doing support their work. We will include links to listen and support them in the show notes.

And of course if you want to support our work we have a study group that starts next week, we’ll come together at 7:30 PM ET on Thursday nights to discuss the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. If you become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month you can join us for that study group or just contribute and make this show possible along with the work on our YouTube channel. 

Now here is our interview with Haydar of The Resistance Report  

For this week’s episode we interview Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani

Leila Shomali is a Palestinian PhD candidate in International Law at Maynooth University Ireland and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.

Lara Kilani is a Palestinian-American researcher, PhD student, and is also a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.

We interviewed them on January 12th to talk about their recent piece “Anti-Zionism As Decolonisation” which is published in the brand new debut physical edition of Ebb Magazine. We will also link a web version of the article in the show notes. I will also say quickly that just recently we hosted a conversation with Louis Allday on our YouTube channel that goes over some of the other topics and analyses in that issue of Ebb Magazine. I highly recommend it and I actually bought a couple copies so that I could share it with others. 

In this conversation we talk about both the terms anti-zionism and decolonization which have each faced their own forms of elite capture and distortion. Along the way we talk about settler colonialism, the Oslo Accords, NGO’s, the limits of human rights discourse and international law for Palestinians, the problems of neoliberal identity reductionism, and why as Lara and Leila write, “the caretakers of anti-zionist thought are indigenous communities resisting colonial erasure.”

I very much enjoyed this discussion and encourage people to check out and support the work of the Good Shepherd Collective which Leila and Lara are members of, and which they talk about through the conversation as well. We will link their work in the show notes.

Leila and Lara reference a number of articles in their discussion and we will link those in the show notes.

We do have a study group starting next week, where we will go over the US military counterinsurgency field manual Thursdays at 7:30 PM ET. If you are interested in that I put a link in our show notes. It is for our supporters whether you support us on patreon on or Youtube. And if you want to stay up to date on all of our work and support our work the best way to do that is to become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism 

"Anti-Zionism As Decolonisation" (their article the episode is based on)

"Jewish Settlers Stole My House. It's Not My Fault They're Jewish" by Mohammed El-Kurd

When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa by Mahmoud Madani

Guide for Jewish Anti-Zionist Allyship

Steven Salaita "A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine"

Defund Racism (includes their report on Regavim)

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin. A couple months ago we had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Le Blanc, the author of a new book entitled Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. 

Paul Le Blanc is an activist dating all the way back to Students for a Democratic Society or SDS in the 1960’s. He is also an acclaimed historian who teaches at La Roche University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of too many books to name, but several on Lenin, Trotsky, CLR James, Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionaries and movements.

We talk to Le Blanc about Lenin’s flexibility, his understanding of Marxism as not a dogma, but a guide to action, his belief that ordinary people could and must change the world, and his childhood. We also get into the concept of the United Front, Lenin’s experiences working with individuals who did not share his ideology, his understanding of dialectics, and his fierce commitment to struggle and to constant learning from struggle. Paul shares some thoughts on Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, his concept of revolutionary defeatism, and the question of authoritarianism, bureaucratization, and democracy through examples in Lenin’s life and leadership as well as what he advocated on these issues at the end of his life.

We close with some thoughts from Le Blanc on today and the type of approach he thinks organizations and parties need to undertake in today’s world in order to change it once again before it’s too late.

We deeply appreciate Paul Le Blanc for taking the time to talk to us about his book which is available now from Pluto Press. 

We would like to thank Aidan Elias who did the lion’s share of the production work on this episode. 

If you appreciate the work that we do, the best way to support the show, to stay updated on our study groups, follow any writings Josh or I may publish, and keep track of our work on both YouTube and our audio podcast feed is to become a patron of the show. You can join that for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We have a new study group that will be announced this week, so keep an eye out for that.