“We’re Not Trying to Make a Better Tomb” - Lydia Pelot-Hobbs’ Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 08/08/2024
"Like We're at War with a Foreign Nation" - How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Anti-Left Repression with Tariq Khan
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview Tariq Khan on his book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. We’ll be releasing this conversation as a two part episode on this excellent book which studies how anticommunism within the US is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism, anti-indigenous thought, and genocidal violence. This helps us to reframe our often twentieth century centric view of anti-left repression in the US. Khan’s work on the 19th century in particular also helps us to see the ways things like race science, eugenics, and...
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Against Western/Imperial Feminisms with Khadija Haynes
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Khadijah Haynes about her recent piece, "A Fetus on the Dirt Road” which offers a sharp critique of Western feminism's complicity in imperialism and its historical roots in racial violence. Haynes argues that Western feminism often obscures the struggles of both Black women and men, relying on colonial and anti-Black logics that fail to address the broader context of sexualized, gendered, and racialized abuses of all Black African people. We discuss other historical and contemporary critiques of feminism, argue that feminism does not have a...
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Counterinsurgency Urbanism with Ted Rutland
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, recorded mid-2024, we speak with Ted Rutland about the evolution of policing from the mid-20th century's professional model to the counterinsurgency urbanism that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Canada. Rutland discusses how community policing, initially intended to bring police closer to communities through multicultural training and social services, became a strategy to win over parts of the community while waging a larger war against the rest. We delve into some of the historical shifts in policing largely as a response to radical movements and urban...
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“What Does It Mean to Be at the Table?” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Among other things, in this conversation we talk about the impact and meaning of 1492 to the Muslim world. We discuss Kashani’s concept of the Blues Adhan by way of Clyde Woods. We discuss the experiences of women muslims, and women scholars in Kashani’s book. We talk about the two jihads and other Muslim practices such as zakat and the contradictions between Islamic thought and practice and those demanded by the capitalist and carceral state. It’s a rich discussion that I hope folks find as interesting...
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“The Dark” - D. Óg on the Writings of Irish Revolutionary Brendan Hughes
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview D. Óg, an Irish Republican and Irish language activist who works with Iskra Books, and their Irish language imprint Bradán Feasa. In this discussion we talk about the Iskra Books publication . Hughes, was a former Irish Republican Army volunteer, political prisoner, and Hunger Striker. And while he is a very well known figure within Irish Republican circles and among those who have studied the provisional IRA, some folks may also have become introduced to him through the book and the Fx/Hulu series Say Nothing. In this episode I talk to D a bit about...
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“Medina Is a Place of Refuge and Creativity” - Maryam Kashani on Muslim Study and Survival in the Bay Area
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the first part of a two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Medina By The Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival It’s a cool book that weaves Maryam’s scholarly ethnographic work with her talents as a filmmaker and a DJ to examine and illuminate various strains of Islam in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Black Power Movement to the so-called war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. She dubs her approach an “ethnocinematic.” We discuss legacies of anti-imperialist Islam on Turtle Island as well as more assimilative ways of being. We’ll...
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The Condition of Palestine as the Condition of the World with Dylan Saba
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode recorded mid-2024, Josh spoke with Dylan Saba about some of his essays beginning with one titled "A Struggle to Destroy the World,” where he argued that the condition of Palestine is the condition of the modern world. We discuss the role of the Iron Dome as an offensive system, its historical context, and its implications for the colonial-imperialist power imbalance in the region. Saba also provides an overview of the strategic use of aid as a weapon to maintain control, division, and weaken Palestinian resistance. We also touch on how the Israeli military's...
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The Tufan of Return: Ceasefire & the Disentanglement of Catastrophe & Defeat with Abdaljawad Omar
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is a light edit of a we hosted with Abdaljawad Omar on our YouTube channel. The conversation was so timely and incisive that we wanted to ensure there was also a version on our audio podcast feed. In this discussion we cover the Tufan of Return, talk about the ceasefire, the prisoner exchanges, the decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure, and the concept of Nakba within Palestine, getting into the issues that Abdaljawad has with the divergent meanings of the word, which get conflated in many analyses of 1948 and into the present. There are on our YT channel, about different topics...
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Zionism as the Negation of Jewish Indigeneity: Darryl Li on Racialization, Colonialism, and Resistance in Palestine
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Darryl Li about some of his essays. We begin by discussing his work and experiences in Palestine. His transformation from an NGO worker in the early 2000s to a scholar and political activist. Li explores the interpolation of Jewishness into a racial category globally. He also explores the Law of Return, which allows any Jew in the world to not only settle in Israel but also to enjoy superior rights to the land than Palestinians. The conversation covers the evolution of Palestinian armed resistance, particularly in Gaza, and the shift in Israeli strategies from...
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“Measuring Salvation in Chains and Corpses” - Andrew Krinks on the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the conclusion of our two part interview with Andrew Krinks on his recently published book . Today we explore the religious functions police play for Christian societies, in particular the US, and their relationship to theological concepts of redemption and salvation. We also talk about religious discipline, labor discipline and regimes of prison labor, which is obviously topical with renewed discussions of incarcerated fire fighters with the recent . Krinks also explains why the dehumanization of prisons should not be understood as a violation of their mandate, but a fundamental...
info_outlineIn this episode we speak with Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, about her book Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an assistant professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. In addition to Prison Capital, she is the co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books 2024). Her research, writing, and teaching is grounded in over 15 years of abolitionist organizing and political education facilitation in New Orleans and beyond.
Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This book is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.
In this discussion we talk about the dynamics that contributed to that history. It’s a fascinating conversation that gets into Louisiana’s shifting political economy, the policing of New Orleans, the importance of sheriff power in Louisiana, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and various forms of anti-carceral organizing from the streets of New Olreans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola.
Massive Bookshop has Prison Capital if people are interested in picking up a copy and delving more deeply into this conversation, as I mentioned a couple times during the episode there is a lot of really interesting analysis in the book that we didn’t have time to adequately address in this conversation.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say we’re releasing this conversation during Black August, find some local or online political education about that, write to political prisoners, get involved in their campaigns.
If you want to support our work please consider contributing a $1 a month or more to our patreon at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. We do have a Trinity of Fundamentals study group that starts this coming week and you can find details about that on our patreon as well.
Links:
Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.
The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration
Trinity of Fundamentals study group