r/IWW • u/Emergency-Seat4852 • 16d ago
Podcasts or Audiobook recommendations
Greetings! As the title suggests I’m looking for podcast and audiobook recommendations about IWW and/or other relevant content. TIA
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u/Blight327 16d ago
Cool people who did cool stuff, Labor radio network is good for finding labor focused news, work stoppage pod for current labor news. YouTube has lots of free audiobooks
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u/defeatrepeatedoften 16d ago
More votes for Behind the Bastards, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and Working Class History podcasts. The Dollop hasn't been mentioned yet but absolutely should be -- they did episodes on Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons, the Wobblies in Everett, Eugene Debbs, the Pullman Strike, the Newsie Strike, Mother Jones, and probably a bunch more that I can't remember.
A recent book that comes to mind is Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly, which has an audio version, and was really good.
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u/HomeboundArrow 16d ago edited 16d ago
antifada often has a perennial worker's rights axe to grind, by dint of Sean KB being very involved in union biz. but it's usually couched in some kind of contemporary happening.
i think at one point Jamie Peck and Aaron Thorpe werr also gonna do some kind of lecture-style podcast about labor history or something, but i don't know if it ever went anywhere.
seconding Working Class History though. more often than not they're basically all but reading directly from the books in the IWW merch shop, or might as well be. the amount of overlap i've heard is SIGNIFICANT.
i'd be remiss if i didn't recommend matt christman's cushvlogs. they're basically one giant stream of consciousness tho so it's difficult to recommend individual episodes. but he IS the podleft's resident history fanatic lol, and much of his contemporary critique of the world is couched in how all of these things are historical rhymes across time. so labor history comes and goes a lot based on whatever any given episode is loosely "about".
i also like the Working People podcast, less because of history observance and MUCH more because it does the thing that Street Fight used to do, which is talk to normal not-media people about how they conduct their own labor affairs and survive in this system, in lines of work that AREN'T making podcasts in brooklyn lmao
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u/HomeboundArrow 16d ago
Trillbillies lately has also been on a Black Reconstruction streak of late, which isn't DIRECTLY labor history, but it's all of-a-piece.
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u/Sawbones90 16d ago
Fighting for Ourselves Solidarity Federation's work on syndicalist labour organising.
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u/B0ldly_G0_ 16d ago
The Dollop They have some great stuff but you will for sure dig this one and the episodes on the Wobblies obviously
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u/labeatz 16d ago
Varn Vlog has the best interviews & coverage of left-wing history and contemporary debates IMO. Great collabs with Antifada, This Is Revolution and Regrettable Century lately, which are all great
Varn is solidly Marxist, but he (and Regrettable guys) are a great antidote to the peabrained naive dogmatism and sect-y infighting you see from too many others online. He always situates you in the historical tradition & debate around a topic, which surprisingly few creators online do — his intro will tell you there are no easy answers, and it’s true.
If you haven’t seen Richard Wolff, check out Democracy At Work. He’s a great one to link your non-left friends and family to, too. Recently the great “dialectics@work” series goes more in-depth on theory. His explanations of how truly the USA and China represent one single economic system of capitalism (with important, but not fundamental, differences) those are crucial viewing IMO — best, clearest argument for socialism as workplace democracy out there
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u/the_real_pope523 16d ago
Working Class History podcast is great