Dr. Kelley is the author of “
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” and Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at U.C.L.A. He will join us to discuss the history and significance of the BAmazon Union struggle and its connections to the period analyzed in his book.
Alabama particularly the Birmingham-Bessemer area has a centuries-old tradition of Black-led organizing against enslavement, racist land seizures, Jim Crow racism, prison-convict labor, segregation laws and Ku Klux Klan violence. Within living memory of the Amazon workers and their families is their starkly dedicated struggle against white-supremacist assassinations and bombings of Black churches and homes during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Tim BarkerÂ
spoke to Mike Konczal
, the author of Freedom from the Market: Americaâs Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand (The New Press).
Tim Barker: You say that
Freedom from the Market has some origin in Occupy Wall Street. How did you express that in this book?
Mike Konczal: This book is the culmination of a political education over the last ten years. And this is the book I wanted to read ten years ago. There have been these really big debates that have come in waves about public provisioning, the necessity of public goods, the role of the market in our everyday lives, neoliberalism, and whether we were at the end of the welfare state under President Obama. I think people understood at the time that there were real problems but werenât always sure how to articulate them, or where to go with the alternative. In more recent years, there was a huge wave of political activismâFight for $15, Medicare for All, free college, Bernie Sand