Rag Radio: Leading Leftist Thinker Carl Davidson Helps Us Make Some Sense of the Political Madness

Thorne Dreyer’s guest Carl Davidson is a leading leftist thinker and political organizer. We asked him to put on his leading leftist thinking cap and help us make some sense out of the political madness that surrounds us!

On the show we discuss the recent mid-term elections, especially the defeat of the LGBT equal rights ordinance in Houston and the election of right-winger Matt Blevin in Kentucky, as well as some hopeful developments — and the presidential campaigns, including the grassroots efforts of Bernie Sanders. And the role of progressives in addressing this whole mess, from the perspective of long-haul organizing. To help us put things in context, Carl quotes Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Carl Davidson is co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, was the founder of the Online University of the Left, and is a local Beaver County, Pennsylvania, member of Steelworkers Associates. Carl works with the Progressive Democrats of America and was a founder of Progressives for Obama. Carl is the author of several books, is a contributor to The Rag Blog and a frequent guest on Rag Radio, and also blogs at Keep On Keeping On. In the 1960s, Davidson was a national leader of SDS, and was a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly.

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. The show’s engineer and co-producer is Tracey Schulz and the staff photographer is Roger Baker. The syndicated show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP in Austin, and is later rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Houston Pacifica’s KPFT HD-3 90.1-FM, and by KKRN, 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA — and is a featured podcast at VT. All Rag Radio podcasts can be found at the Internet Archive. Contact: ragradio@koop.org

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