We created this podcast in recognition that there are a number of podcasts for the American “left,” but many of them focus heavily on the organizing of social democrats, progressives, and liberal democrats. Aside from that, on the left we are always fighting a war of ideas and if we do not continue to build platforms to share those ideas and the stories of their implementation from a leftist perspective, they will continue to be ignored, misrepresented, and dismissed by the capitalist media and as a result by the general public. Our goal is to provide a platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world. Our goal is to center organizers who represent and work with marginalized communities building survival programs, defense programs, political education, and counterpower. We also plan to bring in perspectives on and from the global south to highlight anti-capitalist struggles outside the imperial core...
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episode 262: “The Shadow of the Plantation” - Eugene Puryear on The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader
In this conversation we welcome Eugene Puryear back to the podcast to talk about the recently published book The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader which was compiled by The Black Belt Thesis Study Group and features a foreword by Eugene Puryear.
The reader itself was published by 1804 Books, and they have published a lot of really good stuff recently that I just want to take a moment to shout-out. They recently along with the Palestinian Youth Movement translated and published The Trinity of Fundamentals which hopefully we will be hosting a conversation on at some point soon. They also recently published a translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine and of course the collection of Hugo Chavez’s speeches that we discussed with Manolo de los Santos last year and much more. So I just say that to say if you go pick this book up from them, that there is a bunch of really good stuff you can grab while you’re there.
Eugene Puryear is a journalist, activist, politician, and host on Breakthrough News. He is a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and is the author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America.
In this discussion we ask Eugene to contextualize the origins of the Black Belt thesis, to discuss some of the articulations and development of the thesis as undertaken by Comintern and the CPUSA. We discuss some of the organizing implications of it, its role in the development of the US communist movement particularly with regards to Black people, and the challenging of the problem of white racism as it exists within the history of the US left and white workers as well. Also Eugene discusses the centrality of national oppression within the political economy of US capitalism.
Along the way we talk about some of the contributions from figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Haywood, Louis Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones and others.
A couple of other things I want to highlight is that we have been hosting a lot of conversations over on our YouTube page recently the majority of which we have not released as audio episodes. We will link that in the show notes, but also you can just find it by searching Millennials Are Killing Capitalism on YouTube.
The other thing I want to note is we do have another round of our study group starting back up. For this cycle we will be reading Orisanmi Burton’s amazing book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt. I can’t wait to read that text and discuss it with folks so sign up for that if you’re interested it will be on Wednesday nights at 7:30 PM ET starting on April 17th it is for patrons of the show and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And as always the best way to support our work is to become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism
The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism on YouTube
Tip of the Spear Reading Group (for patrons)