Green and Red Podcast

The Yellow Vests and the Battle of Democracy

🎙️: https://bit.ly/3RifYsQ

The Yellow Vest, or gilets jaunes, are grassroots worker movement that have defied politics as usual in France and the rest of the world.

In our latest, Scott talks with Prof. Ida Susser about her new book- an ethnographic study of the Yellow Vest movement- “The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy.” They discuss who they are, where they come from and the alliances and relationships they built in through their movement organizing. They also discuss the state backlash to them as they refused to comply with liberal and far right political institutions.

Guest bio//Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published on popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the United States, Europe, and Southern Africa. She is the author of “The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy” and many other books.

Why the Global Flotilla to Gaza will Never Give Up

🎙️: https://bit.ly/4txVbyM

In our latest, Scott talks with writer and Flotilla participant Zukiswa Wanner about the Global Salmud Flotilla. They talk about the detention, torture and deportation of two flotilla activists Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Avila. They also discussed her trip to the West Bank in early in 2023 , her experiences last October when she joined the flotilla bound for Gaza, her time on a boat and in an Israeli jail. And finally, they talked about South Africans joining the Israeli Occupation Forces and South African organizing against genocide and apartheid in Palestine.

Guest Bio//Zukiswa Wanner (.wanner) is an award winning South African writer and journalist. Her latest book is Flotilla: A Journey of Conscience about her participation in the Gaza flotilla last year.

In 2025, Wanner was among four South Africans – the others being Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela (grandson of Nelson Mandela), Reaaz Moolla and Dr Fatima Hendricks – sailing with the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSP) international maritime initiative with a mission to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, who were detained by the Israeli special forces when the humanitarian fleet was intercepted on 1 October.
She is now on the South African steering committee of the flotilla effort.

No war but the class war.

Happy Birthday to Karl Marx (known affectionately at the Green and Red Podcast as “Uncle Whiskers), born in 1818.

Check out our episode on the importance of Karl Marx w/ Prof David McNally: https://bit.ly/4d3MxkY

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…. rhe anniversary of the massacre at Kent State, in 1970.

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It’s the 56th anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. In a special encore episode, we’re reposting our episode from 2020.

In this episode, we commemorate the anniversary of the tragic events of May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University, where agents of the state murdered 4 students and shot 9 others. Students, who’d been told the war was winding down in Vietnam, erupted in protest at campuses all over America when Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on April 30th. At Kent State, a working-class public school in Northeast Ohio, protesting students and other burned down an ROTC building, a common target in the Vietnam protest era, and Ohio Governor James Rhodes, vowing a violent response, mobilized the National Guard and sent them to Kent. For two days the students and Guard skirmished, with the paramilitaries hurling tear gas and intimidating students. On May 4th, the Guard, unprovoked, started shooting into the crowd of students and shot 13, killing 4, from distances beyond 300 feet. These were extrajudicial killings and a sure sign the state would murder anyone who challenged its interests. The war had come home!

Scott and Bob, who’s also a historian of the Vietnam War and the 1960s and has published extensively on those subjects, talk about the background to the protests, the official, violent response, the aftermath at places like Jackson State, where 2 more students were killed, and the larger context of anti-state protests and their meaning, and lessons.