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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, May 17, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:04
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| Guests:
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| Simon Pirani, Aleksandra Zapolskaya
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| Try Me for Treason: Russia's Anti-War Political Prisoners
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Simon Pirani and Aleksandra Zapolskaya on Putin’s political prisoners and the film "Try Me for Treason," which premieres on YouTube May 17 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHacVH8tK8 Full info, trailers and links: www.trymefortreason.org
What does it mean to speak truth to power in a courtroom where the judge has already been told the verdict? In Russia today, the “final word” — poslednee slovo — is one of the last constitutional rights available to defendants: a chance to speak, on the record, before sentencing. Simon Pirani has collected their last words in this new book, "Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts " available for a $125 contribution to KPFK. Simon is also co-creator of the film "Try Me for Treason." Simon joins me along with Aleksandra Zapolskaya, Russian exile activist and member of Solidarité FreeAzat. They discuss the people behind the speeches, including the 68-year-old Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Skobov, first jailed under Brezhnev, who told the young people taking blows now that “the last guy standing -- stood with them”; Azat Miftakhov, the mathematician and anarchist sentenced first for having “interesting eyebrows,” then for “justifying terrorism” by watching television in his cell — now being tortured at an Arctic penal colony down the road from where Navalny was killed. Sasha Zapolskaya brings her warning from the Russian experience to Western listeners: “It changes very slowly, and then it happens very fast.” And her hard-won lesson from the FreeAzat campaign: “Being silent doesn’t help. Being loud helps.” The film Try Me for Treason is available free on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=7FHacVH8tK8. All background at trymefortreason.org.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, April 26, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:03
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| Guests:
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| Ashley Smith, Frieda Afary, Aleksandra Zapolskaia, Denys Pilash
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| Trump's war & Consequences for people of Iran & Ukraine
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A panel organized by Haymarket Books and edited for Beneath the Surface. Socialist voices from the United States, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine analyze the strategic logic behind the current imperialist offensive and discuss what a consistent anti-imperialism demands of the left today.
Featured speakers include:
Ashley Smith who traces the strategic logic of Trump's imperial war — rooted in US relative decline and the drive to dominate China's energy supply chains.
Frieda Afary speaks to the progressive forces inside Iran — feminist activists facing execution, imprisoned labor organizers, Kurdish national minority movements — and explains why solidarity with the Iranian people, not the regime, is the only principled position.
Aleksandra Zapolskaya reports from the ruins of Russian civil society on what it means to resist a regime that strangled the independent press and the trade unions before it ever launched its tanks.
Denys Pilash — editor of Commons journal and currently serving in the Ukrainian armed forces — speaks from the front lines on why impunity for one aggressor always opens the door for the next.
The discussion also explores anti-war labor solidarity, the global implications of Orban's electoral defeat, and the debate between genuine internationalism and "campist" logic.
This edited version airs Sunday on KPFK, and the full unedited panel will be available Tuesday on Jacobin Radio.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, April 19, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:03
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| Guests:
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| Kate Levin, Janis Yue, Sanjay Madhav
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| Topics
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| Can USC Faculty Win Biggest Private University Union in US?
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Ballots go out April 24 to over 2,500 non-tenure-track faculty at the University of Southern California — and if they vote yes, they'll create the largest bargaining unit of non-tenure track faculty at a private university in the US.
Three lead organizers of United Faculty-UAW at USC join us: Kate Levin , Janis Yue, and Sanjay Madhav describe two years of faculty-driven organizing, built one conversation at a time — and USC's extraordinary response: borrowing the SpaceX/Amazon legal argument that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional. No other university has gone this far.
They cover the 40-year transformation of academic work that made 75% of USC's faculty non-tenured and precarious; the concrete costs of that precarity — frozen wages, gutted healthcare, arbitrary layoffs, zero transparency about a $250 million deficit; the inspiration of the NYU contract; and why winning this election in this political moment could change academic labor nationwide.
The conversation touches on the healthcare cuts that disrupted Janis's ability to care for her own mental health while working with adolescent trauma patients; Sanjay's experience watching gaming industry workers finally win the unions he once only dreamed about; and Kate's insistence that the choice before USC after the election is stark: respect your faculty's democratic decision, or side with Trump and Elon Musk.
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, April 12, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:03
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| Guest:
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| Clara Mattei
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| Topic
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| Escape from Capitalism
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Political economist Clara Mattei in conversation about her new book, "Escape From Capitalism." Her previous book, "The Capital Order," showed how the economists who invented "pure economics" — the foundation of today's mainstream — did so while openly supporting Mussolini's austerity regime. In "Escape From Capitalism," she takes that historical argument to a general audience as a call to action.
Her core claim is that austerity is not a policy error, not irrational, not a deviation from capitalism that could work better. It is structurally necessary — the mechanism through which the exploitation of workers is reproduced, the reserve army of labor is maintained, and any serious challenge to the system is foreclosed before it can organize.
"Unemployment is not a bug. It's a feature. It's produced by this economic system and it's functional to it."
"Austerity is not optional. It's how the system operates
"An anti-austerity cause is already a revolutionary cause." — Clara Mattei
This conversation comes at a moment when the headlines are doing Mattei's work for her: Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" strips $400 billion from Medicaid and $200 billion from food stamps while Trump requests $1.5 trillion more for his war. As Mattei says in the conversation: it's not about spending less. It's about where the state is spending — and for whom.
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