Today words like "republican" or "independence" or "liberty" are likely to conjure ideas about the freedom of business, right to work laws, and the aggrandizement of owner-entrepreneurs. Joe Clement interviews Alex Gourevitch's about his recent article for Jacobin Magazine on "Wave Slavery and Republican Liberty", which argues against this grain. 

Gourevitch encourages readers (especially working-class organizers) to revisit early American arguments about liberty, in particular some of their radical orientations toward equality and independence. He argues we can find an interesting tradition of revolutionary agitation around liberty in the 18th and 19th centuries, which he says at the time was as much about freedom from economic dependence as freedom from immediate interference. To this end, it was appropriated to great effect by Workingmen's Party organizers in the 1820s and '30s to condemn economic inequality and the wage-slavery it generates, going so far as demands to radically equalize property. But then, Gourevitch shows, later generations of who he calls worker-republicans, like the Knights of Labor and even the Industrial Workers of the World, build on these ideals.

Joe and Alex consider that history and its implications for 20th and 21st Century class-struggle. The first 15 minutes is what was heard on air, and focuses on the earliest history of the worker-republicans. The second part was recorded before and after the on-air portion, where they talk about later worker-republican agitation, the shifting ideology of liberty, as well as race and gender as potentially unmet challenges for worker-republicans.

Alex Gourevitch teaches political science at MacMaster and is a post-doctoral researcher at Brown University. He also co-writes a blog called The Current Moment.

Hosted by Joe Clement, this show covers recent developments in Italian politics, experiences in public healthcare, challenges to voting rights laws in the Supreme Court, and why economic justice is an issue for LGBT activists.  

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1.  The suprising rise of Beppe Grillo and the Five Point Movement in Italy -- Steve Hellman talks with Bill Resnick.

2.  Iven Hale tells a vivid story about working in public healthcare. 

3.  Well-read Red Frann Michel looks at the issues before the Supreme Court in a challenge to voting rights laws.

4.  Denise Morris interviews Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis of Queers for Economic Justice.

in this personal account, Old Mole Iven Hale recounts some harrowing experiences as a community healthcare worker trying to help folks who are doubly challenged with both serious illness and poverty.

Bill Resnick talks with economist David Weiman about the political forces encouraging the growth and maintaining of prisons and punitive policing in the USA. They consider not only media influence and legislators desire to keep jobs in their areas but also the fear-enhancing effects of social isolation and division and the correlation between inequality and incarceration. They discuss the impact of widely available guns and lobbying in support of gun rights. They consider the role of mental health professionals, the use of psychoactive drugs, and the likelihood that mental illness is a consequence of incarceration rather than a cause of crime. Weiman provides a brief history of the relation between drug laws and mass incarceration: although NY's Rockefeller drug laws became a model for Nixon's war on drugs, they did not initially increase incarceration rates because the NY police and legal system declined to implement them punitively until Ed Koch came to political prominence. The interview touches on the connection between drug crime and lack of economic alternatives in good jobs.