Woodbine Podcast

Woodbine's podcast returns with an episode on Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim's new film You Can See Everything. Eric and Matt are joined by Abe Walker to discuss who or what Nathan Fielder's work is about, where the drama and artistry comes from, and what genres he's working within and against. Is the film true crime, a documentary, a mockumentary, a making-of, or performance art?--Replication as Revelation: Contingency, Detail, and Cinephilia in Nathan Fielder's Re-creations" - Jordan Schonig, 2025: https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/pub/replication-as-revelation/release/4--The Year’s Best Film Is This All-Time Great Mind-Melter - Nick Schager, 2026: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/you-can-see-everything-nathan-fielders-elizabeth-holmes-movie-is-the-years-best-filmAbe Walker is author of Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and Struggle for Unionism in the American South, published in 2026 by Temple University Press.

For this week's episode, we discuss the State Department's recent report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", which was released three weeks ago.Matt and Sam are joined by D, a lawyer with a wide-ranging practice in civil litigation and criminal defense, to talk about the political context the report is being released in, the myth-making operation its performing to influence both domestic and foreign policy, and the implications in its targeting of the National Lawyers Guild, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the People's Forum.READINGS:--"Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" - The Department of State, 2026: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf--"U.S. Squeezes Cuba Even as It Searches for a New Regime Leader" - Tyler PagerJulian E. Barnes and Frances Robles, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/us/politics/us-search-cuba-leader.html--"Remarks at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" - Scott Bessent, Christopher Landau, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, 2026: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-ministerial-on-the-resurgence-of-political-terrorism--"Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence" - Donald J. Trump, 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/

For this week's podcast we're joined by George Katsiaficas, author of the classic texts The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (1987) and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (1997), as well as the more recent collections Gen Z Makes History (2025) and Eros and Revolution (2024). We discuss his idea of the eros effect and what we can learn from following global waves of uprisings. We think together about where both radical consciousness and self-organization comes from, as well as the danger of a Thanatos effect, where we see a contagion of confusion, depression, and nihilism. LINKS:--Gen Z Makes History: https://www.eroseffect.com/gen-z-makes-history--George Katsiaficas's Website: https://www.eroseffect.com/George Katsiaficas is a social theorist who is known for his many writings on social movements, 1968, and Asian uprisings. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he coedited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. He was a professor of humanities and sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston for more than three decades. Katsiaficas is a militant researcher, who lives amongst and collaborates with the people he writes about and sees his research as advancing global activism, not simply describing or analyzing it.

Chaia Heller & Mason Herson-Hord join Andrew and Matt to discuss their work with the Institute for Social Ecology, co-founded by communalist philosopher Murray Bookchin in Vermont in 1974. We reflect on the ideas and legacy of both Bookchin (1921-2006) and Occupy Wall Street; the need for joy and the celebration of life; the limitations within both Marxism and anarchism for facing our present ecological crisis; the task of counter-hegemony and keeping a set of ideas alive across generations; and the role of feminism and creating new forms of socialization together.--"Ecology, Desire and Revolution: An Interview with Chaia Heller" - Rebecca DeWitt, 1999: http://www.cwmorse.org/archives/perspectives.on.anarchist.theory.vol3.no.2-fall1999.pdf--"Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life" - Chaia Heller, 1999: http://new-compass.net/articles/notes-ecology-everyday-life--"Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution" - Chaia Heller, 2005: https://social-ecology.org/wp/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/--"A Government From Below" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2018: https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2018/a-government-from-below/--"Assembled in Detroit" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2020: https://assemblymag.org/assembled-in-detroit/Chaia Heller is a writer, activist, anthropologist, and artist who has been teaching political and feminist theory at the Institute for Social Ecology for nearly four decades. Chaia has been active in movements ranging from ecofeminism and the Left Greens, to the global justice movement, and Occupy. Chaia is the author of The Ecology of Everyday Life (Black Rose Books) and Food Farms and Solidarity (Duke University Press).Mason Herson-Hord is an organizer and writer in Detroit, Michigan, where he is an active participant in the development of neighborhood assemblies and the solidarity economy. He is a founding member of Symbiosis, a North American federation of dual power organizations, and a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. His work has been published by outlets like the Next System Project, ROAR Magazine, The Ecologist, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.Andrew volunteers at Woodbine and is currently working toward finishing a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen join Giulia and Matt to discuss their shared nomadic journey as artists, anarchists, parents, curators, teachers, partners, writers, thinkers, friends, and so much more. In 70 minutes, we discuss their last 50 years of collaboration. Meeting amidst the utopian movements of the 60s, they were influenced by their encounter and friendship with anarchist groups such as Anarchos, the Judson Dance Theater, and Situationism in America. Believing in the power of collectivity and the potentials of oppositional culture, their work has dealt equally with the spectacle of disaster and the invisibility of daily life. With a practice simultaneously reflecting on authorship and ownership, audience and autonomy, independence and institutions, they have been editors of the radical film journal Jump Cut, and curators and archivists of forgotten revolutionary cinema.--"Escape Routes" - Ernie Larsen, 2021: https://herri.org.za/5/ernie-larsen/--"Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation" - Ernest Larsen, 2014: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/LarsenAnarchistActivists/index.html--"The Dialectics of Making Movies: Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen interviewed by Lia Yoka" - 2009: http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/assets/pdfs/MILLNER_Dialectics_of_Making_Movies_Yoka.pdf--"The Last Word: To unite filmmakers and film critics" - Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, 1979: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/LarsenMillnerEdl.htmlSherry Millner & Ernie Larsen collaborate on film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and other research projects. Together they have produced more than a dozen films exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, and storefronts. Millner creates installations such as The Domestic Boobytrap, which detournes U.S. army manuals to manifest the vulnerability of domestic space, with blueprints and models of boobytraps placed in everyday life situations within the nuclear family. Larsen's feminist detective novel Not a Through Street was nominated for an Edgar Award. His nonfiction novel The Trial Before The Trial, describing his “disruptive” service on a grand jury in New York, was published by Autonomedia. He is currently writing a novel about the French anarchist Ravachol.As co-creators of the collaborative video project State of Emergency, they involved 15 artists in protesting U.S. invasions of the Middle East. In 2008 at the Oberhausen Film Festival they co-curated  “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” 10 programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. They co-curated the Fall Flaherty Foundation series in 2013 at Anthology Film Archives, under the title “Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition.” They are co-curators of Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form non-fiction films and videos, for Facets Media. They organized and contributed to the collaborative book Capital’s Greek Cage (Autonomedia), an exploration of Greece’s near-collapse in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Their most recent video How Do Animals and Plants Live? is an inquiry into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki on July 27, 2016.Video Data Bank: https://www.vdb.org/artists/sherry-millnerAutonomedia: https://autonomedia.org/?s=larsenFacets DVD: https://www.facetsdvd.com/searchresults.asp?Search=millner&Submit=

Sandi Hilal and Pelin Tan join Malek and Matt to discuss alternative pedagogies of unlearning in Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and within refugee spaces in Europe and the Middle East. Together we talk about questioning our social coexistences, decolonization, conflict, and care. How and where do we learn new ethical and artistic practices amidst collapse, as our relationships to infrastructure and institutions change within moments of rupture? We speak about the contested meanings of public and private space in a colonial context; the need for designing self-organized autonomous infrastructures to cultivate free thought; and the intifada as both a pedagogical practice and a producer of new forms of knowledge. What does it mean to have a collective creative praxis, “one that is not grounded in practices of empathy, but rather in the knitting of the commons”? How does our work intervene in built environments, and create new spaces from which to speak?Urgent Pedagogies: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/Campus in Camps: http://www.campusincamps.ps/Decolonizing Architecture Art Research: https://www.decolonizing.ps/Arazi Assembly: http://araziassembly.org/Sandi Hilal is an architect, artist and educator. She is currently the Co-Director of DAAR, Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, an architectural and art collective that she co-founded in 2007 with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Sandi is the initiator of the living room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host, and to activate the rights of temporary people to host and not to eternally be a guest. She co-founded Campus in Camps in 2012, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with the aim to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production connected to greater transformations and the democratization of society. Her latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019), co-authored with Alessandro Petti, is a book, a catalog, and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. Hilal co-authored with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Turkey. Tan is a curator of Urgent Pedagogies in design&art by IASPIS (Stockholm), and collaborates with artist Anton Vidokle on essay films about the future society. She is a member of the Arazi Assembly based in Mardin.--“Camps as Trans-Local Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2017: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/refugee-heritage-conversations-pelin-tan-camps-as-trans-local-commons/6760--“The Question of Collectivity: Dispossession, Surplus, Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2019: http://collectioncollective.art/text/the-question-of-collectivity-dispossession-surplus-commons--“A Conversation with Pelin Tan: Field as entanglement and transversal methodology” - Ishita Sharma, 2020: https://topologicalatlas.net/blog/a-conversation-with-pelin-tan-on-studying-place-as-a-constellation--“Planetary Migration under Anthropocene: Crisis and Solidarity “- Pelin Tan, 2020: http://migrazine.at/artikel/planetary-migration-under-anthropocene-crisis-and-solidarity

We’re joined by Jose Rosales, Carla Bottiglieri, Luhuna Carvalho, and Giulia Gabrielli for a roundtable on Marcello Tari’s book, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, published in English this spring by Common Notions.We discuss a genealogy of the concept “destituent power”, alongside the historical movements it’s been a response to: Italy in the 70s, Argentina in 2001, and the aftermaths of both the Arab Spring and Occupy movement. We think with Tarì alongside Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Tronti, and Agamben on the existential and methodological questions of use and inoperativity, strike and gesture, de/subjectivation and conversion, territory and exodus, civil war and political theology, and infrastructures of reproduction.-- “Xeniteia: Contemplation and Combat” - Mario Tronti & Marcello Tarì, 2020: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4757-xeniteia-contemplation-and-combat-- “Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline” - Hostis, 2020: https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/--“How Does One Shoot a Frozen Clock?” - Luhuna Carvalho, 2020: https://illwill.com/how-does-one-shoot-a-frozen-clock-- “Spirituality and Combat: A Conversation with Marcello Tarì” - Matt Peterson, 2021: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/118/391829/there-is-no-unhappy-love-the-communism-of-destitution/Carla Bottiglieri studied Classics and Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy and Performing Arts/Dance at the University of Paris 8, France, while working in the field of contemporary dance and theatre. An independent researcher, she deals with an unidentified territory on the margins of aesthetics, clinics and politics. She has been studying different methods in the field called somatics, which she understands as practices related to the “use of bodies”.Luhuna Carvalho has just finished writing a thesis on Operaismo and Autonomia, and is a part of the RDA69 social center in Lisbon.Giulia Gabrielli is an artist and researcher interrogating, in solitude and company, the question of how to live.Jose Rosales is a researcher based in Queens, currently co-editing a series of conversations entitled 'Diversity of Aesthetics' alongside Andreas Petrossiants and Vicky Osterweil.

Mary Boger, Michael Lardner, and Kazembe Balagun join Amogh and Matt to discuss the New York Marxist School, the Brecht Forum, and the Marxist Education Project--experiments in both radical pedagogy and autonomous space in NYC dating back to 1975.We trace together the how and why of our political histories, as well as the Brecht Forum’s organizational evolution from collective, to committee, to board of directors, to staff--and finally back again to collective. We’re warned of the challenges and contradictions in running such a program through the forms of the non-profit industrial complex, and the need to insist upon self-conscious, voluntary participation in a strategic project aimed at building community rather than audience. Such a space is a place to think out loud together, process and analyze current events, and develop a revolutionizing curriculum. We’re reminded of the Brecht Forum’s core organizing principle of being both non-dogmatic and non-sectarian--to emphasize culture, art, poetry, and music as being essential to the process of both movement building and becoming a better person. How and where do we organize ourselves to undo the individualization, fragmentation, demoralization, commodification, and brutality we experience--to work toward an intergenerational re-socialization and self-education based on compassion and care?--“The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School: To the Next Generation” - Mary Boger, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/remembering-arthur-felberbaum--“Reflections on the Brecht Forum / New York Marxist School” - Liz Mestres, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/reflections-brecht-forum-new-york-marxist-school--“Our Legacy” - Marxist Education Project, 2014: https://marxedproject.org/our-legacy/--“Brecht Forum Promo Video” - Kazembe Balagun, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQbziBfDEg4Mary Boger, a founding member of the New York Marxist School/Brecht Forum in 1975, is a long-time Capital teacher for movement activists, and has been involved in solidarity and human rights struggles for many years. Her CUNY Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology is entitled "A Ghetto State of Ghettos: Palestinians under Israeli Citizenship."Michael Lardner has worked in truck stops and road construction, and as a typographer and designer, with decades of coordinating complex printing processes. In 1977 he began his engagement with The School for Marxist Education, which eventually became The Brecht Forum, and since 2014 he has done coordination and programming for The Marxist Education Project. He has helped organize the Revolutions Study Group, the Capital Studies Group, and the Literature Studies Group.

Natasha Lennard and Matthew Whitley discuss some themes and questions from the updated paperback edition of Natasha’s book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, published last month by Verso.We talk about acting and thinking in the absence of Trump’s dominance of the mediasphere, and how we relate to debates around the “crisis of liberalism” and “collapse of the center” in a now-Democratic Party controlled government. We reflect on 10 years after Occupy, with indigenous and abolitionist movements now centered in any imagination of liberation, and the many crises that won’t be solved legislatively. We ask how to not let emphasis on prefigurative mutual aid practices--which create interdependency and care, intimacy and community--cede the ground of “policy”, which reimagines the structural conditions within which we live. And how do we find and use alternative, authentic, strategic voices in our present media ecology to articulate and build legibility for utopian horizons of flourishing and autonomy?Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum and the New York Times, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research and is the author of “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life" (Verso).Matthew Whitley is a writer and organizer affiliated with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council - MACC NYC. He is currently a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, with a research focus on alternative economies in Catholic social teaching. He also serves on the steering committee of the Emergency Committee for Rojava and co-edits the radical artists' imprint Cicada Press. His poetry chapbook, "Do You Like the Word Crisis?", was published by Commune Editions in 2019.--"Anti-fascist Practice and Impossible Non-Violence" - Natasha Lennard, 2018: https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/--“Why 'Mutual Aid'? – social solidarity, not charity” - Matthew Whitley, 2020: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/why-mutual-aid-social-solidarity-not-charity/

Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Jennifer Scuro discuss Richard’s recent book The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, published by AK Press in December.We discuss communism and love as an experience and a practice, of both commitment and devotion, towards new valuations beyond exchange. We think about forms-of-life versus forms-of-governance, and the role of the “precarious commune” and Gemeinwesen in our conceptualization of a communism of love beyond capitalism. We talk about contemporary revolts, and the need for revolutionary alternatives to “revolution”. And we use the framework of critical disability studies to talk about attention, care, and labor, and how our relationships of love are currently valued.--"Love: a counterpower to capital worthy of its name" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://roarmag.org/essays/communism-of-love-gilman-opalsky/--"The Communist Secret of Love" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://illwill.com/the-communist-secret-of-love--"The Eternal Return of Revolt: A Conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky - 2020: https://illwill.com/the-eternal-return-of-revoltRichard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of six books, including Specters of Revolt, Precarious Communism and Spectacular Capitalism. Dr. Gilman-Opalsky’s work explores the powers of everyday people, particularly those typically regarded as powerless. He challenges the idea that politics is solely the business of the professional political class, and highlights how impoverished and marginalized people participate in changing the world in the most important ways.Jennifer Scuro, Ph.D. (she/her) is author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, 2017). She recently was interviewed for Shelley Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability, and is working on a series of video interviews with Monica Vilhauer, Rogue Philosophers, discussing practical philosophy, philosophical counseling, and public philosophy.