KPFA - Against the Grain

Employers regularly check the background of potential workers for criminal records, even though claims that such checks predict their diligence or trustworthiness are dubious. Anthropologist Melissa Burch reflects on how criminal background checks became commonplace — and what vested interests maintain their ubiquity.
Afterlives of Conviction Project
Melissa Burch, The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America Princeton University Press, 2026
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Did Charles Darwin influence Karl Marx? Joel Wainwright argues that Darwin significantly shaped Marx’s understanding of historical change — with implications for how we meet the ecological crisis today. And he reflects on the potential role of strikes and boycotts in moving beyond capitalism.
Joel Wainwright, The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis Verso, 2025
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Was the populist far right a reaction to neoliberal free market fundamentalism? Or, as historian Quinn Slobodian argues, did such rightwing currents come out of the ideas of neoliberalism itself? Slobodian reflects on neoliberal thinkers’ preoccupation with racist and misogynistic ideas of human nature and intelligence, borders and gold — all in service to their war on the left. (Encore presentation.)
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right Zone Books, 2025
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The Trump administration uses antifascism as a term of abuse and has branded Antifa domestic terrorists. Yet antifascism has a long but often little known history in the U.S.  Journalist Christopher Mathias describes the efforts of radicals to unmask and dismantle the far right.
Christopher Mathias, To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right Atria Books, 2026
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The groundswell of opposition to Trump’s deportation agenda has been astounding. But there has been a long history of immigrants opposing the U.S. state’s efforts to terrorize and deport them. Historian Adam Goodman discusses the struggles mounted by immigrant workers in the 1970s, the 2006 immigrant workers general strike, and the necessity of organizing lasting movements for change.
Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants Princeton University Press, 2021
Adam Goodman, “Barring the Gates: A History of Political Exclusion and Family Separation in Cold War America,” Labor (2021) 18 (1): 54–66.
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