Lowcountry Takes Action! with the Lowcountry Action Committee
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 12/03/2025
Mapping the ADL’s Origins in Settler-Colonial Liberalism, State Power, & Civil Rights as Cover with Emmaia Gelman
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we are joined by Emmaia Gelman, author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the ADL as a Cold War neoconservative institution. Gelman excavates the Anti-Defamation League's origins as a white, settler colonial institution founded by German-Jewish elites—not to combat antisemitism broadly, but to manage class respectability and suppress Eastern European Jewish immigrant socialists whom they viewed as a racial and social threat. Gelman looks back at how early Jewish settlers had built fortunes through participation in 19th-century US...
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The Camp David Republic: Egypt, Normalization, and the Long Defeat With Nihal El Aasar
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, Nihal El Aasar returns to this podcast to discuss the competing progressive alternatives in the Arab world prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. Arab attempts to join capitalist systems were obstructed by British and Zionist colonial power, leading to the maintenance of a hegemonic state. We also reference the Union of Arab States and the role of the Zionist entity in hindering regional development. Gamal Abdel Nasser and other leaders in Egypt attempted to create a sovereign economic and political space through nationalist projects. This was actively resisted by...
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The Financialization of the Culture industries & the False Promises of Spotify
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify’s emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it. From there, we turn to Arcand’s comparison of Spotify’s ambitions to Uber and...
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Nothing is More Sacred than the Defense of Humanity: Gerald Perreira on Cuba, Iran, Liberation Theology, and the Caribbean
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we sit down with Gerald Perreira, longtime Guyanese anti-imperialist activist, educator, and organizer, for a conversation on Cuba, U.S. power, and the unfinished struggle for true independence in the Caribbean and broader Global South. We unpack the tightening of U.S. pressure on Cuba, including the attack on Cuban medical brigades across the region, and examine why Guyana’s recent political decisions represent a historic betrayal of transnational solidarity. From Cuba’s lifesaving medical internationalism and its decisive role in defeating apartheid forces in Angola and...
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The Revolt Eclipses Whatever The World Has to Offer with Idris Robinson
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by Idris Robinson to unpack his book, , a searing meditation on race, revolt, civil war, and the psychic wreckage of American life. Reflecting on the 2020 uprisings, Robinson challenges the myth of Black leadership, reframes racial violence through the lens of a “morbid libidinal economy,” and argues that revolution is as much a transformation of the human spirit as it is a political event. Drawing on the legacies of Black insurgency, Robinson interrogates liberalism, identity politics, and the hollowing out of American cities—while pondering on what it...
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The Long Transition to Socialism & Unequal Exchange with Torkil Lauesen
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, longtime revolutionary activist and author Torkil Lauesen returns to the show. Our conversation revolves around two of his recent works published by Iskra Books: and . Drawing on a lifetime of political engagement and his close relationship with theorist Arghiri Emmanuel, Lauesen discusses his motivation for writing these books as a means of passing down hard-won knowledge to a new generation of organizers. We examine the “long transition” from capitalism to socialism, a process Lauesen frames through the lens of historical materialism. He also explains how the transfer...
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Spring Surge to Melt ICE: Dare to Struggle on Building Organized Mass Resistance to Smash the Deportation Machine
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode, we are joined by organizers from Dare to Struggle, a multinational organization committed to struggling against all forms of domination. Throughout this conversation we discuss some of their tactics deployed in response to the recent uptick in ICE raids happening nationally. We take a critical look at what has been effective and what has not, and the stakes for those who are daring to struggle against the deportation machine are up against. We also discuss their recent calls for a Spring Surge to melt ice, please check out the show notes to see how you can connect and get...
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"Death Itself Is On Sale" - Ali Kadri on The Accumulation of Waste
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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Queen Mother Audley Moore: Midwife of Black Revolutionary Nationalism with Dr. Ashley D Farmer
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
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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Resisting the Surveillance Systems Behind ICE’s Kidnappings with Ed Vogel
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
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...
info_outlineIn 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 exposure of Black communities to hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators is inseparable from the region's history of chattel slavery and why Black people must be at the vanguard of the environmental movement.
We then situate the crisis within the broader context of the Black Belt, a historical homeland of Africans trafficked to North America. Now among the most vulnerable regions to climate change, drawing on Kali Akuno’s prediction that large portions of the Black Belt may be underwater by 2050. We explore what displacement, housing costs, and organized abandonment mean for Black communities in the Carolinas and beyond.
The conversation also turns to international frameworks, particularly Cuba's model of sustainable development and the parallels between Cuban soil erosion and sea level rise and the ecological challenges facing Gullah Geechee communities. We discuss how the Lowcountry itself lives under a kind of economic blockade, how this juxtaposition illuminates environmental racism, neocolonialism, and anti-Blackness.
If you like what we do want to support our ability to have more conversations like this, please consider becoming a patron for as little as one dollar a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism, you can also support via a one-time donation at BuyMeACoffee.com/MAKCapitalism
Lowcountry Action Committee’s Website, LinkTree, Youtube
Cuba’s Life Task: Combatting Climate Change (Tarea Vida)
Organizing to Free the Land with Kali Akuno