Welcome to Jacobin Radio. I'm Melissa Figueroa, director and producer of the show, sitting in for Susie Weissman.

Susie is traveling today, but she was part of a conference in honor of Boris Kagalitsky,

who is languishing in Putin's prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

Today we bring you the panel from the conference discussing Boris's latest book, The Long Retreat,

published while he was in prison.

Three distinguished leftist activist scholars, Bill Fletcher

Jr. Alex Kalinikos and Jayati Ghosh, present their appreciation and their critiques of

Kogarlitsky's analysis and account of the rise of the right and the decline of the left

over the last 40 plus years.

Our speakers address Kagarlitsky's clear-sighted, brutally honest, and internationalist account

of the global left parties and formations today that cannot come to terms with new realities,

but rather simply try to reenact the past.

They also address Kagalitsky's lucid critique of an

identitarian politics of difference which makes forming broad mass political projects very difficult.

We'll get their analyses informed by their own substantive experience and writing.

All this when our program returns in just a moment.

Hello. Yeah, I'm David Castle. I'm editorial director at Palutzo Press, who published

Boris's most recent book, many books by Boris in fact, The Long Retreat Strategies

to Reverse the Decline of the Left. It is time now to move on to our first speaker. Bill Fletcher

is a long-standing activist in workplace and community struggles. He is the former president of Trans-Africa

Forum and a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy

Studies. He is the author of Their Bankrupting Us and 20 other myths about unions amongst

...