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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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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, March 15, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:03
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| Guest:
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| Kevan Harris
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| Topics
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| War on Iran, Regime Change Fantasy, & the Anti-War Movement
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Two weeks into the US-Israeli assault on Iran, every prediction made by the architects of this war has proven wrong. The regime has not collapsed. Protests have not reignited. Iran's new Supreme Leader — more hardline than his assassinated father — has vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. And the war began while negotiations in Geneva were apparently close to a deal.
Kevan Harris joins us on Day 14 of Operation Epic Fury. We talk about Iran’s domestic political economy and why the regime fragility thesis was always wrong. Kevan insists there are zero historical cases of regime change by bombing working. Every US intelligence agency told the White House this before the war started. And yet 4 Democratic Party hawks support the Trump administration's war effort -- and Kevan says they must be held accountable because it's 2003 all over again. He describes Israel's war strategy as a widening gyre with no limit and no endpoint — one likely to produce another war on Iran within two years.
The political visions of a different Iran — "neither turbans nor crowns" — won't disappear under bombs. And he says building an anti-war movement is the left's most urgent task right now. "We might have a hot summer"
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Beneath The Surface
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Sunday, March 8, 2026 10:00 am
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1:00:04
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| Guest:
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| Yassamine Mather
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| Topics
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| US-Israel war on Iran
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What are Iranians actually experiencing right now? We hear from Yassamine Mather, Iranian socialist, chair of Hands Off the People of Iran, and researcher at Oxford's Middle East Centre — who has been in direct contact with relatives, colleagues, and comrades inside Iran throughout the bombing.
Mather describes near-hourly strikes, hospitals hit, internet cut, and a propaganda war in which state TV claims nothing happened while satellite channels say nothing is left. She explains why Trump's promise to 'liberate' Iran has produced the opposite: people who were in January's anti-regime protests are now joining pro-government demonstrations — not for the regime, but out of rage at foreign attack. She assesses Khamenei's death, the removal of his brake on IRGC adventurism, Netanyahu's real objective (not the nuclear program but Iran as a country), and why this war makes 2003 look well planned. She also addresses the illusions some on the left hold about Russia or China as potential saviors — and why those illusions are not just wrong but dangerous.
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