Coming From Left Field

2026 GUESTS

145 (June 1, 2026)

Chris Smalls — co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union — discusses his new book, how a COVID-era walkout at Amazon grew from a demand for worker safety into a broader movement for dignity and security for the American working class.

144 (May 26, 2026)

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Harvard historian Sven Beckert traces capitalism's thousand-year global history, challenging Eurocentric myths about its origins. Born from trading networks across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism expanded through state power, violence, and coercion — not free markets.

143 (May 19, 2026)

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Labor educator Les Leopold argues that both major parties are instruments of the billionaire class, tracing the roots of working-class disillusionment to deindustrialization, NAFTA, and Wall Street's financial strip-mining of communities through mass layoffs and stock buybacks.

142 (May 14, 2026)

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Anthropologist Ida Susser analyzes France's Yellow Vest movement as a grassroots revolt against financialized capitalism that is eroding welfare. Through traffic-circle blockades and makeshift commons, they built horizontal, leaderless solidarity across regional and ethnic lines.

141 (April 30, 2026)

Renowned Holocaust scholar John Roth offers ten meditations on confronting poverty, corruption, and inequality, tracing the American Dream back to its founding ideals while critiquing individualism, exceptionalism, and Trump-era politics.

140 (April 21, 2026)

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Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson uses the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooting as a lens to examine how the right transformed a vigilante into a folk hero, helping to dismantle the New Deal order and lay the groundwork for Trump-era "law and order" politics.

139 (April 15, 2026)

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Philosopher Gabriel Rockhill discusses how US imperial power waged an "intellectual world war" through universities and cultural institutions to shape what counts as radical thought within the imperial core, including the CIA's promotion of a safe, anti-communist "Western Marxism."

138 (April 1, 2026)

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J. Albert Mann discusses her comprehensive history of American labor, tracing workers' struggles from colonial times to the present, the rise and fall of unions, the battles against corporate power, and what that history offers for rebuilding labor power today.

137 (March 24, 2026)

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser discusses her book, which examines the cultural & social history of the American serial-killer era & explores how the rise of serial murder intersected with deindustrialization, social atomization, & development of forensic criminology.

136 (March 12, 2026)

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Sociologist Charles Derber returns to discuss his new book on oligarchy, examining how a tiny plutocratic class has seized control of American political and economic institutions and what political strategies and movements can effectively challenge concentrated elite power.

135 (March 4, 2026)

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Three guests discuss this anthology on labor organizing during the Gilded Age, recovering stories of worker resistance from one of American history's most brutal periods of inequality, with veteran organizer Chris Townsend connecting historical lessons to today's labor movement.

134 (February 20, 2026)

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Two sociologists examine the devastating economic impact of single motherhood on women and children since 1980, showing how the retreat of the welfare state, stagnant wages, and the absence of affordable childcare have left single mothers structurally abandoned by public policy

133 (February 10, 2026)

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Writer, journalist, critic, and educator Toby Manning brings a Marxist analytical lens to the history of popular music, examining how class struggle, capitalism, and resistance have shaped rock, pop, soul, and punk, and how music both reflects and shapes political consciousness.

132 (February 3, 2026)

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A.J. Horn, known online as Comrade Drew, discusses his work making socialist theory accessible to new audiences, arguing that Marxism is not a dogma for academics but a practical tool for understanding exploitation and organizing resistance.

131 (January 13, 2026)

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Sociologist and media scholar Andy Lee Roth discusses Project Censored's 50th-anniversary edition, which highlights underreported stories, documents how tech platforms conduct mass content takedowns, and examines state surveillance of journalists and social media critics.

130 (January 8, 2026)

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Civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis argues that mainstream media, including NPR, the New York Times, and PBS, systematically collaborate with police and prosecutors to distort public understanding of crime, manufacture fear, and legitimize mass incarceration.

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2026 GUESTS

2024: GUESTS 129 to 95

2024: GUESTS 94 to 70

2023: GUESTS 69 to 46

2022: GUESTS 45 to 21

2021: GUESTS 20 to 1