Ba'ath and Ba'ath: Arab Socialism in Syria and Iraq

Rudy joins two guests to trace the multi-faceted history of the Kurdish movement across the Middle East. We discuss the origin of the Kurdish people, their situation during the collapse of the Ottoman and Qajar empires, and how this fractured Kurdish lands across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, sparking over a century of varied liberation struggles. From the short-lived 1946 Republic of Mahabad and the rise of competing feudal, leftist, and tribal politics to the legal parliamentary movement in Turkey and the contrasting modern governance models of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Rojava, we unpack the deep class, regional, and ideological currents shaping the ongoing fight for Kurdish self-determination.

Donald interviews C Derick Varn and Daniel Tutt, authors of "The People Are Not One" in the wake of their recent tour promoting their book. With MAGA losing steam and centrist liberalism, a left-wing populist movement within the Democratic Party seems to be on the rise. Our guests bring their work to bear on this phenomenon, discussing the long-term viability of left populism (and premature obituaries), their debate with Geese Magazine, the fraught discourse around "wokeness" and escaping the framings of the bourgeois media, the question of the PMC and their unique take on it and how the internet has impacted mass politics.

In view of the political situation, we have reuploaded a podcast with Iker Suarez on the border situation in Spain. We hope to have an updated episode soon. ------ In this episode, Rudy joins Iker Suárez, author of The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle, to delve into the politics of migration and borders in Europe, examining how imperialism, class, and race intersect in what our guest describes as a "genocide at sea." We explore who the people migrating to Europe are, why they move, and how their journeys expose the contradictions at the heart of European liberalism. Our guest argues that immigration today represents the return of Europe's colonial past, and critiques how both the right and the nominal left continue to enforce violent border regimes -from the Tarajal massacre to ongoing state repression- while masking them as "human rights" issues. We also discuss the limits of NGO-led antiracism, the weak state of immigrant organizing across Europe, how the concept of race is undeveloped, and how citizenship itself becomes a new class divide.

Aaron Leonard and Donald Parkinson sit down for a conversation on Leonard's recent book 'Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism'. Relating this history to current events, Leonard and Parkinson discuss the various ways that the U.S. government, and in particular the FBI, subverted civil liberties and indulged in state repression according to the ebbs and flows of geopolitics while never abandoning its agenda of surveillance and subversion of the Communist Movement. From the early days of Criminal Syndicalism laws and the Palmer Raids to the rise of the New Left and the marginalization of the Party, the long arc of a campaign of espionage that utilized legal and extra-legal tactics provides an important window into the nature of state repression against left-wing dissidents in a country that is supposedly a bastion of political liberty.

Christian, Donald and Parker sit down to discuss Lars Lih's new book What was Bolshevism? They situate the context of the book, and discuss what this new manuscripts adds to Lih's existing oeuvre. Topics discussed include Lih's use of narrative to frame the continuities in Bolshevism from begging to end, the centrality of Vlast and sovereignty to Bolshevism, how Lih exposes the misunderstanding of past historians about war communism, the importance of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's ABCs of Communism and the nature of Bolshevik policies such as the grain monopoly, requisition, and sowing committees during the Civil War.