Show
Date  | Days
to
Stay | Action |
|
Beneath The Surface
|
|
Sunday, January 25, 2026 10:00 am
|
1:00:12
|
|
| Guests:
|
| Robert Brenner, Dylan Riley
|
| Topics
|
| Trumpism as Counter-Revolution in a Stagnant World.
|
Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley on the deeper meaning of Trump’s return to power.
Is Trump just a narcissistic strongman — or the carrier of a coherent counter-revolutionary project?
Brenner and Riley argue that Trumpism is not a return to the past, but an attempt to reorganize society for a future in which capitalism can no longer grow — only command, police, and exclude.
They trace the roots of Trump Two to decades of economic stagnation, the collapse of US hegemony, the failure of Bidenomics, and a deep class split between credentialed and non-credentialed workers.
They see Trumpism as a social revolution aimed not against capital, but against the credentialed middle and working class — built on four pillars: attacks on universities, expansion of the security state, the use of AI as class warfare, and the dismantling of the international order.
Tune in for a sobering conversation about Trumpism as counter-revolution in a stagnant world.
|
|
|
55 |
|
|
Beneath The Surface
|
|
Sunday, January 18, 2026 10:00 am
|
1:00:12
|
|
| Guests:
|
| Kevan Harris, Yassamine Mather
|
| Topics
|
| Iran's Protest Movement
|
Over the past several weeks, Iran has experienced its most serious wave of protests since the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022. What began as an economic protest quickly turned political, with chants calling for an end to the Islamic Republic — and the most brutal response of repression in the history of the Islamic Republic, with killings, mass arrests, executions, and an internet blackout.
UCLA political sociologist Kevan Harris reconstructs the spark that ignited the protests -- a technocratic reform perceived as an unjust tax, adding to economic and political grievances that exploded into a broader uprising.
Iranian scholar and political activist Yassamine Mather examines the brutal repression that followed, and the dangerous media distortions surrounding the uprising as exile groups promote monarchist fantasies and openly flirt with US and Israeli intervention. Mather says Iranian protesters overwhelmingly reject both the Islamic Republic and the shah’s dictatorship — and foreign intervention threatens to crush the very movement it claims to support.
|
|
|
48 |
|
|
Beneath The Surface
|
|
Sunday, January 11, 2026 10:00 am
|
1:00:12
|
|
| Guests:
|
| Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos, Denys Pilash
|
| Topics
|
| Venezuela, Ukraine: Naked Imperialism & Spheres of Interest
|
The U.S. assault on Venezuela on January 3 wasn’t justified with talk of democracy or humanitarian intervention. Trump said the quiet part out loud: oil, resources, and power. Brazilian political economist Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos argues this new “Donroe Doctrine” is openly transactional, unapologetically imperial, and a sign of a declining hegemon turning to force to secure oil, minerals, and supply chains. Bastos explains why Venezuela was chosen as the first target, how China looms behind U.S. strategy, and why the Maduro regime — authoritarian, corrupt, and deeply anti-democratic — cannot be defended as socialist without emptying socialism of meaning.
Denys Pilash, a member of Ukraine’s democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, joins from Kyiv under blackout conditions. Drawing on his scholarly work on Venezuela and his lived experience of Russia’s invasion, Pilash argues that opposing U.S. imperialism and opposing authoritarian regimes like Maduro’s are inseparable struggles — and that accepting imperial “spheres of influence” destroys the case against Russia’s war on Ukraine.
|
|
|
41 |
|
|
|
34 |
|
|
|
27 |
|
|
Beneath The Surface
|
|
Sunday, December 21, 2025 10:00 am
|
1:00:13
|
|
| Guests:
|
| Oscar Mendoza, Pabo Abufom
|
| Topics
|
| Chile elects far right extremist: what happened?
|
Chile has just elected its most extreme far-right president since the Pinochet dictatorship. José Antonio Kast won the December 14 runoff by a commanding margin — a stunning reversal in a country that, just a few years ago, experienced a massive social uprising over the unaffordability of life and extreme inequality. The social revolt ended with the pandemic lockdown, but the following year a broad leftist coalition swept into power, electing the 34 year old former radical student leader Gabriel Boric, whose government promised to bury neoliberalism once and for all.
How did Chile move so quickly from an anti-neoliberal social rebellion to the return of the hard right? Was this a vote for authoritarianism — or a vote against insecurity, inflation, and political stalemate? What does Kast’s victory tell us about the global resurgence of the far right, from Latin America to Europe and the United States?
We examine Chile’s political reversal with two Chilean analysts: Oscar Mendoza explains this electoral shift by looking at the failed constitutional process, the role of mandatory voting, media panic over crime and immigration, and the institutional constraints Kast will face in office. Pablo Abufom Silva situates Kast’s victory in a longer historical trajectory, arguing that this is the first democratic government of pinochetismo: a project combining authoritarian neoliberalism, moral conservatism and anticommunism, now aligned with a global far right resurgence.
|
|
|
20 |
|
|
Beneath The Surface
|
|
Sunday, December 14, 2025 10:00 am
|
1:00:12
|
|
| Guests:
|
| Oleksandr Kyselov, Alyssa Oursler
|
| Topics
|
| Trump’s Moscow-scripted “Peace Plan” for Ukraine
|
We look at what’s being sold to the world as “peace” in Ukraine – and what it looks like from the standpoint of Ukrainians who are actually living through the war. Trump’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine — drafted behind closed doors by his real estate ally Steve Witkoff and a Russian sovereign wealth fund chief — reads less like diplomacy and more like a property deal: Russia gets the land, the US takes its cut, Europe foots the bill, and Ukraine is told to choose between surrendering now or surrendering later – with little input in the process.
Ukrainian political analyst Oleksandr Kyselov argues that what’s on the table is not a just peace but an imperial carve-up — and that the Ukrainian left is fighting for what he calls “the least unjust peace” under conditions of military exhaustion, political turmoil, dependency, and mounting pressure from competing imperialisms in Washington and Moscow.
Journalist Alyssa Oursler’s new report from Kyiv captures what this “peace plan” looks like through the eyes of people living and fighting there. She spoke with soldiers, left intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians in bookstores, on streets, and during funeral processions. She shows how Trump’s policies have already worsened the war, delaying air defenses, increasing civilian deaths, and deepening Ukrainians’ sense that their fate is being negotiated without them.
We ask what a real peace would look like, why Ukrainians fear being forced into a deal that rewards Russian aggression, and what international solidarity from the left ought to mean now.
|
|
|
13 |
|
|
|
6 |
|
| All Shows |
A Service of the Pacifica Foundation - Built by
KPFTx
button is to the most recent 5 shows.