Episode 43: Serving The People with Delency and Blake from Hella Black Podcast
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 12/16/2019
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this conversation a group of us interviewed Dr. Ali Kadri about his book The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. This conversation was the final discussion in a study group which began last October and involved participants from all over the world. The book provides a theoretical framework which understands waste as a value making process where war-making, the wasting of social classes, and the wasting of social nature become central to capitalist accumulation and to how capital resolves crises in accumulation. The questions in this discussion were those that...
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In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Ashley Farmer to discuss the life and legacy of Queen Mother Audley Moore—an organizer, theorist, and political visionary who helped shape the very foundations of modern Black nationalism and the contemporary reparations movement. Though she was, as our guest writes, “one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century,” Mother Moore’s figure has been largely confined to a handful of photographs and passing references, even as her ideas reverberate across generations. Dr. Farmer discusses how if Rosa Parks is remembered as...
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In this conversation we speak with Ed Vogel from Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure about the rapid expansion of various police surveillance programs. We talk about the nexus of private corporations, policing agencies, and nonprofit foundations and organizations that facilitate the expansion of these technologies and how they seek to circumvent democratic processes and oversight mechanisms. We discuss ICE, Customs & Border Patrol, Atlanta’s Cop City, Shot Spotter, Flock Safety, Fusus, and automated license plate readers. Ed also talks about what we do and...
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In this episode we are joined by Wassila Abboud to discuss her essay, "." Our conversation begins with her meditations on grief in Lebanon. We explore how people often name today’s grief through the language of past griefs — and what this transference between past and present reveals about the psyche under domination. From there, we turn to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” and why Abboud argues this analogy fails to capture Lebanon’s relationship to catastrophe. We discuss why so many returns cluster around 1982, how that year fractured grief itself, reshaping collective...
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In this episode, we’re joined by Austin Cole to discuss the three-part series Black/African Liberation & Grassroots Economies, beginning with part one: “Rootedness for our people, our economies, our liberation.” We start with Toni Morrison’s concept of rootedness and how it informs urban planning and economic development. From there, we’ll dig into Strategies of Counter-war—how fascists are shaping local policy, and how BAP-Baltimore is building alternatives from the ground up. We examine the threat of elite capture and the strategic use of municipal power: how can engagement...
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This is the audio from a video we hosted with Hala Sabbah from The Sameer Project on December 3rd, 2025. Hala returned to the program to talk about life in Gaza nearly two months into the so-called "ceasefire." We spoke about the realities on the ground and the needs of people in Gaza right now, what is getting into the strip and what is not, and how the Sameer Project is working within the current conditions in Gaza. We also talk about the need for continued organizing, boycotts, and direct action against the zionist entity. And we spoke about creative ways people can fundraise for Sameer...
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In this episode, we are joined by organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee to discuss climate justice in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. We begin with a discussion about climate reparations and the state's unfortunate priorities. We go on to explore the history of phosphate mining and its exploitation of newly emancipated Africans, the ecological destruction it caused, and its legacy of environmental racism. We then turn to hurricane season and the anxiety it provokes in vulnerable working-class and poor Black communities, followed by the toxic legacy of military pollution and...
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In this episode, recorded in the summer of 2024, Josh interviewed two organizers from the Lowcountry Action Committee. Lowcountry Action Committee is a Black African grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Our conversation centers around their 2024 piece on environmental racism, where they trace the climate catastrophe, threatening to wash away Gullah Geechee homelands back to the phosphate mining industry of the eighteen sixties. We discuss how today's disproportionate...
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In this conversation we speak with a labor organizer and people’s historian who covers Latin American movements with connections to Ecuador, Colombia, and Cuba. Folks may know her by the twitter handle . In this conversation she discusses recent struggles and developments in Ecuador. In particular a recent 38 day general strike, and the popular rejection of a recent referendum including measures which would have allowed the US to build military bases in Ecuador and cut public funding for political parties. Our guest contextualizes the current US-backed narco-military regime lead by...
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In this episode, we are joined by Dalton Lackey and Teagan Murphy, co-authors of the article “The COVID-19 Murders”: Prison death-worlds and the fatal convenience of crisis. Their work offers a piercing critique of how carceral institutions weaponized the pandemic—not as an unprecedented emergency, but as a tactical opportunity to deepen control, dehumanization, and death. We’ll begin by hearing from Dalton and Teagan about their political motivations, the methodologies they employed, and the intellectual scaffolding behind their analysis. From there, we’ll unpack their challenge to...
info_outlineIn this episode, we got the opportunity to sit down with two amazing organizers and fellow radical podcast hosts. If you’re not familiar, Hella Black Podcast is an Oakland based audio experience brought to you by Delency Parham and Blake Simons. Their hope for each episode is to educate and inform their listeners about all things related to Blackness. Their podcast is important because it uplifts the voices of Black radical organizers who are doing the work in the field.
We talk to Blake and Delency about their own politicization, and how Hella Black Podcast got started. They talk to us about their organizing with People’s Breakfast Oakland, and what it was like to have Colin Kaepernick stop by and work with them on his birthday.
We discuss Blake's relationship to Jalil Muntaqim and the ongoing struggles of political prisoners in the US.
We also talk about the uptick of presidential organizing with the election, and their own disappointment with folks putting so effort into that arena of organizing.
Delency and Blake also share their own thoughts on the necessity of aligning theory to practice and getting involved at the grassroots level, even if it’s on the smallest scale.