Another Look at Losurdo's Stalin Featuring Henry Hakamäki, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, David Peat, and Ben Stahnke
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 10/17/2024
Eric Mann’s Radical Journey through the Long 1960s (Part 2)
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is part two of a two-part episode. This part of the conversation deals more with the actions that led to Mann's political imprisoment and his experiences as a political prisoner. In this two-part episode, we are joined by special cohost PM, and we speak with veteran civil rights organizer Eric Mann about his journey from his upbringing in New York to his involvement in political struggles during the 1960s. Mann discusses his early influences, including his parents' activism. He reflects on his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...
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Eric Mann’s Radical Journey through the Long 1960s (Part 1)
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this two-part episode, we are joined by special cohost PM, and we speak with veteran civil rights organizer Eric Mann about his journey from his upbringing in New York to his involvement in political struggles during the 1960s. Mann discusses his early influences, including his parents' activism. He reflects on his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), highlighting key campaigns such as the Trailways boycott and the 1968 Columbia University student strike. Mann also recounts his time as a political prisoner, offering...
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“Individual Acts of Resistance Can Lead to New Terrains of Struggle” Garrett Felber on the Life of Martin Sostre
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this conversation we talk with Garrett Felber about their latest book . In discussing this new political biography, we cover Sostre’s ideological and political journey, history as a jailhouse lawyer, his forms of organizing practice, and the ways that people supported his campaign for freedom from political imprisonment. We talk about the influence of Great Depression era Harlem, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, national liberation movements, armed struggle, Women’s Liberation, and Anarchism on Sostre’s political thought and practice. Although much of what...
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“There Has to Be Some Consequences for These Horrors” - Tariq Khan on Settler Colonial Violence and Antileft Repression
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Tariq Khan on his book . In of the conversation we laid out many of the general dynamics between anti-indigenous settler colonial violence in the 19th Century and the development of the earliest iterations of anticommunism in the so-called United States, long before McCarthyism or even what’s recognized by historians as the first Red Scare. In this conversation we talk about some of the legal precedents that the Trump administration has dusted off for some of his attempts to remove or exclude people for political views. Because...
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The Obscurant Function of 'Artificial Intelligence' with Edward Ongweso Jr
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Edward Ongweso Jr about "artificial intelligence" and its implications, particularly concerning corporate interests and historical parallels with labor control. Edward critiques the term “artificial intelligence” for obscuring the underlying digital technologies and algorithmic systems that serve corporate agendas, emphasizing the narrow view of intelligence that excludes human cognitive elements. The conversation delves into the historical roots of computation, drawing parallels between modern AI and 19th-century plantation management techniques aimed at...
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Rejecting Neoliberalism & Neo-McCarthyism at US Universities with Charles HF Davis III
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III about the increasingly repressive conditions on university campuses, particularly in the context of Columbia University's caving in to federal pressures under the thumb of Trump’s administration. We explore the broader implications of these concessions at the expense of liberalized notions of intellectual and academic freedom, student activism, and the role of universities as sites of political struggle. Dr. Davis highlights the historical and ongoing repression of student activism, particularly pro-Palestinian movements, and...
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"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...
info_outlineIn July of 2023, we published a conversation on the Iskra Books translation of Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend with Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (book/listen to part 1 here).
We found the book really fascinating and had lots of questions, so we were only able to cover about half of our questions in our first conversation. This conversation is essentially the part 2 of that conversation, in which Henry and Salvatore are joined by Iskra editors David Peat and Ben Stankhe. Of course by the time we got around to recording this episode in late October, we were three weeks into Israel’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against Palestinians, after the heroic uprising known as Al-Aqsa Flood. Obviously, I didn’t intend to delay the release of this episode for almost a year, but at the time I kept telling myself there would eventually be a ceasefire and a new normal would be established. One year later that hasn’t happened yet, and doesn’t necessarily seem and closer than it was a year ago.
All that is really by way of an apology to Ben, David, Henry, and Salvatore for not getting this episode out sooner. It absolutely warrants your attention and it actually relates in many ways to not only the struggle of Palestinians today, but to all struggles for national liberation, socialism, and communism.
We also just hosted another conversation on Domenico Losurdo’s work last week on our YouTube channel. In that one, Gabriel Rockhill discusses the English translation of Losurdo’s ‘Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn,’ which he edited and was just released on Monthly Review Press (book/episode).
There are a number of references in the episode which I have tried to link in the show notes. First and foremost head over to Iskra books and check out their catalogue of books. As Henry mentions all of their books are available as free pdfs, but I definitely also encourage you to support their work. They’re doing really important stuff, and we plan to highlight more of their work going forward.
I’ve also linked a conversation we had a couple months ago on another Iskra Books release Ruehl Muller’s Building a People’s Art which is about the role of art and artists in the Vietnamese liberation struggle (book/episode)
As Henry and Salvatore mention at the end of the episode, Communism: The Highest Stage of Ecology, which is an agroecological history of the Soviet Union and Cuba, which will be out via Iskra later this year. You can follow all of Iskra’s releases on Iskrabooks.org and just a reminder that free PDFs are available for this book and all of their others on their website.
We plan to highlight more Iskra Books publications going forward. Including a soon to be scheduled episode on a book they published on Yugoslavian film, and on October 28th at 10 AM EDT we’ll host Conor McCabe to discuss The Lost & Early Writings of James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary (book/livestream)
And lastly, this is our third audio episode of October, and we are trying to get back to releasing audio content with more regularity. To that end it would be really helpful if some of our listeners who do not yet support the show on patreon, became patrons for as little as $1 a month. The main purpose of becoming a patron is of course to support our work, but we do have a recent patreon-exclusive episode with several folks from Black Liberation Media including Jared Ball from IMIXWHATILIKE, Renee Johnston from Saturday’s with Renee, and Geechee Yaw from Earn Your Liberation. Shout-out to all of them and if you become a patron of the show you will get access to that recent conversation which primarily focuses on social media, YouTube and censorship. Sign up at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism
Guest bios:
Henry Hakamäki is best known as the co-host of the Guerrilla History podcast. And of course among many other things, he is also the co-translator and editor of the book we will be discussing today. You can follow him on Twitter at @huck1995.
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is Professor at the Geography Department of SUNY New Paltz and is chief editor for the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. His book Socialist States and the Environment is available from Pluto Press.
Ben Stahnke is an educator, organizer, and artist working on the intersection of political ecology, education, and print. Ben holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in environmental studies, a M.A. in political philosophy, and is currently pursuing a second doctorate in education.
David Peat serves as an editor and copy-editor for both Iskra Books and Peace, Land, and Bread, is a student of Marxism-Leninism from Lancashire, England, who organises with Red Fightback. He has a B.A. in philosophy and is interested in political economy, ecology, and revolutionary education.