Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Josh MacPhee is probably best known for his brightly colored art and design work. Even if you don’t know the artist, you likely have seen his striking signature imagery at protests and as part of movement hubs around the world. But just as important to his art is Josh’s work as an archivist and collector of movement ephemera. His most recent book is the result of one of his deep dives into the world of music of international labor movements. From farm fields in California to the floor of the Fiat factories of Italy and beyond — workers have b...

“Poets,” Stanley Kunitz writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.” Poets, yes, and teachers and librarians along with citizens and artists of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy, leaning into the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights, the complex, fugitive concept, “truth,” and the right to think at all. We’re remembering the brilliant artist...

Debt is everywhere, and its demands are boundless—debt demands repayment, of course, and it typically demands interest on top of that. But debt’s visible and obvious demands are just the beginning. Debt’s sticky, spidery web demands, as well, fear and anxiety, distrust and dishonesty, guilt and shame—it demands insecurity and precariousness. The demands are financial, of course, and personal, but also psychological, cultural, political, and existential. We’ re joined by Kristin Collier, author of What Debt Demands:Family Betrayal and Precarity in a Broken System, part memoir and part research from the ground—a compelling journey thro...

Colleges and universities—and all educational institutions—are natural sites of struggle over fundamental questions: what knowledge and experiences are of most value? Who should have access to that valuable knowledge? What is the truth about this or that, and what’s the evidence? Where do we come from and what we hope to be? These questions are messy, full of conflict, even dangerous, and universities are both venues to discuss ideas, and stages where we put those ideas into practice, arguing and contending over the meaning of history, class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and every other aspect of what i...

The US school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. Join Eve L. Ewing and Bill Ayers at a season of the Socialism 2025 conference for a discussion of the historical origins of white supremacy and racial hierarchy baked into the DNA of American schooling.

We know what the authoritarian vision of education and schooling is—it’s laid out in detail in Project 2025: an end to public education, taxpayer funding for religious and private schools, teachers reduced to clerks, and students as indistinguishable widgets moving along an assembly line as bits of information are poured into their upturned heads. For decades there’s been a relentless campaign to define education in instrumentalist, linear, and expedient terms, and high-stakes standardized tests have been a common cudgel in the hands of the powerful, a kind of modern and scientized eugenics device. Simultaneously, the marketeers have organi...

What’s happening? How did we get here? Where are we on the clock of the world? And where do we go from here? Today—and everyday—we need to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions in order to continue to develop a dynamic and concrete analysis of concrete conditions—a guide to resistance and action. Surrender is not an option, and living in a perpetual defensive crouch is never the way forward. No. In the words of the legendary organizer Ella Baker, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” In June, 2026 Bill met up with Keeanga-Yama...

Fugitives are on the run—not free yet, they are running and running hard…running toward freedom. Refugees have escaped war or catastrophic climate collapse or extreme social disintegration, and forced to flee their homes, compelled to confront a fresh landscape, they invent new ways of living, learning, loving, and being—on the run. Walter Riley is a long-distance runner—he’s been in the mix and on the move for eight decades. A refugee from the Jim Crow South where as a teenager he was a renowned organizer and activist, and at 19 moderated a conversation with Malcolm X in Durham...

We're delighted to be joined—again—by Mark Nowak, a labor activist, organizer, legendary teacher, and prize-winning poet, who is the founding director of the Worker Writers School. I've participated in sessions at the School several times, and the joy and energy that explodes into the room is striking as domestic workers, cab drivers, miners, and other workers embrace and display their intellectual and creative talents. Adrienne Rich praised Nowak for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature." Here we discuss AGAIN, his photo-text commentary on MAGA, touching on mass incarceration, school shootings, environmental collapse, white nationalism, and war.

Anarchy is community gardens and potluck dinners, playgrounds and art classes, friends and family in the foreground, and dancing wildly on the ruins of a system that was killing us. Anarchy is spontaneous cooperation without coercion, mutuality and reciprocity, tolerance for confusion, contingency, improvisation, dialogue and debate, experimentation, spontaneity, and the flux that accompanies constant social learning. Anarchy is embracing the cosmic dream boogie and a freedom we’ve never tasted. Anarchy is free people doing all the things that free people do, and respecting other free people doing everything that free people do. We're in conversation with Jessica La...

Nancy Kurshan invented a robust, creative, and riotous Movement life. From the early days of the Black Freedom Movement and the anti-war struggles against the US invasion of Vietnam, through the Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial, radical solidarity with Puerto Rican independence and Palestinian liberation, and her feminist insistence on speaking up and being heard, Nancy Kurshan is an extraordinary and wise woman. She was a Red Diaper baby, raised as a child of the communist movement, a veteran of demonstrations for racial equality and against nuclear arms while still in high school. Nancy Kurshan was a founding member of the...

Israel and its sponsor, enabler, and co-conspirator, the United States, extends it’s Forever War against Palestine and Palestinians, doubling-down on the genocide in Gaza, escalating ethnic-cleansing in the West Bank, and igniting fresh conflicts in Lebanon and Iran. The madness grows as war fever sweeps the region, and Israel sets itself on a suicidal path. We’re joined at Pilsen Community Books for a public conversation about war, peace, art, history, and resistance with our friends and comrades Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of...

In the late 1960s Detroit was ripe for revolution: a wave of urban insurrections had swept the country from coast to coast, and the 1967 Detroit rebellion was one of the largest and most consequential; Black auto workers who had experienced marginalization and discrimination in the industry as well as from their own union (UAW) were organizing grass roots resistance; and Detroit was a center of Black radical thought, notably fired by the presence of the Marxist leader CLR James, as well as James and Grace Lee Boggs. On May 2, 1968, 3000 workers at the massive Dodge Main plant participated in a...

We are living through difficult times, tough times, and we’re not alone. Genocide, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, increasing inequality, unapologetic imperial dreams and white supremacist policies unleashed, fascism on the rise—people all over the world are suffering, they get hurt and they get hard. Our rage and our sadness for all the unnecessary suffering, while understandable, can easily lead to despair and worse. But despair is deactivating, distorting, and destructive—a weapon of the powerful. Activism is a necessary antidote to despair, and activism opens a practical space where hope can come alive. Join us in conversation with o...

Once again the US is at war in the Middle East, and once again the “coalition of the willing” is Israel standing alone, hand-in-bloody-hand with the US. If history is a guide, when the US boot comes down, freedom and humanity are not the winners. The autocratic and sclerotic regime in Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors in recent months, and the murderous medieval rulers of that land were widely reviled and resisted by their own people. During the protests, and now with the war, desperation, rage, sadness, fear, and uncertainty characterize the reaction of many Iranians of good...

Power habitually lies in public to make a particularly egregious point: We can lie in public, and you can’t stop us. “We didn’t murder that protester, she was a domestic terrorist determined to kill police;” “I strangled that Black man to death because I feared for my life.” The debate over whether the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is indeed a genocide is a fraudulent diversion—the genocide was pre-announced by government leaders in October, 2023: “We will starve them; we will deny them medicines and fuels; we will make Gaza uninhabitable.” The so-called ceas...

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were used by the powerful in the government and the bought media in the most manipulative and shameless way, whipping up Islamaphobia and xenophobia to justify and accelerate a rush to war. This would be a war without boundaries, justified battlefields, or any identifiable end-point—a “war on terror.” The war-makers never elaborated on the objectives of their war—where it would be fought, how it would be conducted, or how it could be won—simply that it would be a crusade against faceless and nameless evil-doers wherever they might be lurking. The message boomed forth: shu...

Here is the proposed preamble to a new Constitution for Public Education, conceived by the visionary teacher and organizer Jay Gillen: “Every middle-schooler will have the expectation that when they are in high school they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with peers, younger children, or other people in their communities.” He offers this radical proposal in order to propel a conversation and an organizing focus toward building a broad national consensus about how children should be prepared to grow up with dignity and strength in all of our communities. When he recasts the language of the...

Here we go again—another invasion, another occupation, another aggression. The US government is a warmongering behemoth that is in a constant, continuing state of war, and it ceaslessly gas-lights the pubic, asking us to repudiate “your own lying eyes,” and to instead embrace euphemisms designed to make murder, theft, and brazen lawlessness sound inevitable and benevolent. A humane future makes a simple demand on each and all of us: RESIST! We’re joined in conversation with Michelle Nickerson, professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author, most recently, of Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on T...

We each share a human culture, a human experience, and a human fate with everyone who exists, or ever did exist—we are born, we suffer, we die. And yet, within that vast shared experience there are enormous disparities and variations—all of which can test our capacity for empathy and human solidarity. Imagine facing bombardment and continuous war, invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the murders of your friends and your children and your family members, the loss of home and community, dislocation and exile—all the worst experiences human beings have suffered. Come close; don’t look awa...

International solidarity is at the heart of our hopes for fundamental, humane change in the US. There can be no revolution in values or in fact if progressive Americans wrap themselves in the myth of “exceptionalism” and stand aside from the global struggles leading the fight against imperialism and for peace and justice. We need to become comrades, standing together—shoulder-to-shoulder against a common enemy and toward a common goal. We join, then, a voluntary association characterized by enthusiasm and joy at being part of something larger than ourselves. We’re not allies, functioning in service to, but rather comrades...

Police agencies across the country have functioned from the start as a violent arm of the elite and a cat’s paw in resisting racial justice and economic fairness. Today’s ICE agents are in the long tradition of slave patrols, SWAT teams and Red Squads. During the high tide of the Civil Rights Movement the brutality of Southern sheriffs was on full display, but two critical phenomena are missed when the dominant narrative focuses exclusively on iconic photos from a few dramatic moments: first, state  repression—brutality, physical violence, infiltration and spying, reputational attacks, bogus prosecutions—against the Movement w...

We surely know by now that freedom is more journey than destination, more a summons to struggle than a port-of-call in which to lie down and take s rest. We understand freedom most acutely, paradoxically, when we name the obstacles to our full humanity as unacceptable, and link arms to storm the barricades in the name of liberation. There are moments in history when an apparition of freedom appears clearly, and its meaning is transformed and enlarged—General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was just such a moment. Twenty thousand enslaved people liberated themselves, taking freedom into their own hand...

These are tough times for teachers and students, for young people and their families, for immigrant communities, for people of color, for all of us. All times are tough, of course, but the consolidation of white supremacist power, the organized acts of everyday cruelty, the disdain for humanity, the consolidation of autocracy, the performance of savagery, the unchecked embrace of selfishness, selective humanization and the rendering of large sections of human beings as disposable—the vilest human qualities and the beating heart of capitalism—make our lives all the more precarious, and precious. We’re joined by Kathryn (Kat) Zamarron, a Chica...

On September 27, 2025 we met up at Pilsen Community Books with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla of About Face: Veterans Against the War, a dynamic and powerful group involved in building an irresistible movement for peace and against war and fascism. About Face builds on and highlights the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements. They walk a difficult and necessary path, organizing inside the military as they support GI resistance and the right to refuse, and outside as they create structures of care and support that prevent enlistm...

On Monday, September 29th the National Public Housing Museum in collaboration with the Goodman Theatre hosted a conversation between Lisa Lee, the founding director of the Museum, and the playwright Zayd Dohrn whose hip hop rock musical Revolution(s) opens the Goodman Theatre's centennial season in October. The gathering was part of an epic citywide and year-long event—100 Free Acts of Theater—which will activate all 50 wards in the city to celebrate the artistic fabric of Chicago, amplify existing arts programming, and collaborate on new efforts. (Learn more at GoodmanTheatre.org/100FreeActs). The conversation roamed widely and revolved around ques...

When Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Coast in August, 2005, the devastation was just beginning. The government was murderously unprepared—when the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans was underwater, 1500 people lost their lives, thousand more were injured, and property losses were estimated at $125 billion. The capitalist media consistently smacked its lips over suffering and offered an upside down world where victims became criminals, and mutual aid was portrayed as theft.  The afterlife—the trauma, waste. and wreckage—of the catastrophe is ongoing and includes displacement, corporate theft, privatization of public goods, educide, and cultura...

The speed at which a fascist government can disrupt, dismantle, and destroy on its way to building a full-blown fascist society is breathtaking. Resistance is scattered, and anyone looking to the Democratic Party to offer guidance or leadership should remember that we came to this point on bipartisan rails, that is, the ruling class and the political establishment has agreed for decades on every major issue: unqualified support for Israel’s murderous and illegal actions; the militarization of domestic police forces and policing as the ready-answer to every social problems; mass incarceration as a defining feature of society; the fr...

Just as the US Department of Defense should change its name back to the more accurate and honest War Department—its true function and its title from 1789 until 1947 when it morphed into the National Military Establishment (NME), and then, with mad-help from a PR offensive in 1949, the DoD—state and city organizations with names such as “child welfare” and “family services” should stop air-brushing their true functions—the Departments of Family Policing. We’re joined in conversation today with Erin Miles Cloud, the mother of two dazzling kids, a civil rights attorney, and co-editor of a new book from  Haymarket called  ...

The severe challenges and unforeseen possibilities facing humanity today cry out for clarity. We need it all: poetry and politics, art and the people’s army, agitation and organization, theory and practice, deep study and sustained action, joy and justice, both the moments of quiet contemplation and the times of swift, sharp thrusts, dreams as well as deeds. We’re delighted to be joined from Santiago, Chile by Vijay Prashad, a preeminent Marxist theorist and activist intellectual. His work continues the initiative of the Tricontinental Conference in Cuba which brought together revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Today...

In 1922 a commission made up of prominent citizens—six Black men and six white men appointed by the governor of Illinois—issued a report about the 1919 Race Riot entitled The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. Eve Ewing’s dazzling poetry collection, 1919, excerpts small bits from the report as epigraphs for each poem, comments like “…the presence of Negroes in large  numbers in our great cities is not a menace in itself,” and “the sentiment was expressed that Negro invasion of the district was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire.” To...

If you were ever an enthusiastic reader of “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Peanuts,” “Blondie,” “Doonesbury,” or the “Boondocks,” you have a treat coming your way: “Mafalda,” a six-year-old comic book character created by the artist Quino in Argentina, is now available in English in a dazzling translation by Frank Wynne. Mafalda is a precocious kid—Frank describes her as “six going on sixty”—who observes the world around her with fresh eyes, and then asks the kind of queer questions that the grown-ups in her life can’t or won’t answer. Mafalda’s concerns focus on humanity and world peace, and her innocence shines a brig...

Big time college sports have distorted the intellectual mission of colleges and universities for decades—and we’re in a particularly volatile period as athletes organize themselves into unions and demand a share of the riches that they’ve created with their labor, as well as the fashioning of a system that makes intercollegiate athletics increasingly indistinguishable from professional sports. The “Transfer Portal,” the “Name/Image/Likeness” deals that athletes sign with third parties, and now direct payments to athletes on top of their scholarships (which typically cover tuition, housing, and health care) create a Brave New World for universities, p...

The mass incarceration system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow”—there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850. There are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height. And while the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s people, it holds over 25 percent of the world’s combined prison population. There’s more, of course, but you get the idea—the tentacles of the criminal lega...

Thomas Jefferson was the masterly author of the ringing and rousing Declaration of Independence as well as a human trafficker and serial rapist. The second president  embodies James Baldwin’s observation that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” The US is a settler-colonial colossus whose founders committed one of the most massive genocides in the history of the world—violence in the service of wealth accumulation has been a national calling card from the start. It’s also the birthplace of Harriett Tubman, John Brown, Geronimo, Ma...

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) led by Karen Lewis, a charismatic high school chemistry teacher, was elected to lead the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010.  Lewis was a brilliant, transformational labor leader, and CORE developed a forceful form of social justice union organizing they called “organizing for the common good.” They foregrounded the best interests of the child, and they insisted on raising issues beyond wages and benefits, standing up for the arts, libraries, and nurses in every school as well as for the rights of families and the broader community. Among CORE’s early initiatives were starting...

Solidarity takes on many forms but for over four decades one vivid example rose out of a design and print studio in Havana, Cuba. Born in 1966 out of the Tricontinental Conference the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina — OSPAAAL) strove to unite liberation movements across the three continents. The Tricontinental magazine and the colorful, multi-lingual posters inserted within became legendary and covered the walls of activists and revolutionaries around the world. 

Inspired by the intersection of graphic design and...

Dave Zirin (“Edge of Sports;” and Under the Tree, Episode #58 ) gave a delightful and provocative talk at a conference a few years ago called “Will There Be Sports Under Socialism?” The short answer—of course!—human beings have played games and sports from the beginning, and there’s no stopping us. But capitalism has distorted and mangled our natural desire and capacity to play in its relentless drive for profit. An ongoing case-in-point is the Olympic Games, flying under the noble banner of internationalism while on the ground exploiting athletes and workers, destroying host communities, increasing militarism, and more. Dave introduced...

The Invisible Institute—with its evocative and mysterious name—exists in the proud tradition of “guerrilla journalism,” a difficult to define or pigeon-hole practice of human rights inquiry and documentation. This dazzling collection of journalists, archivists, writers, thinkers, organic intellectuals-without-portfolio, organizers, activists, data analysts and other collaborators pioneer a form of journalism based on long-term relationship-building, deep inquiry, and on-going interrogation of our shared social/political world. They are  investigative reporters, multimedia storytellers, human rights champions, and facilitators of difficult public conversations. The Invisible Institute has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and produced a film that was a finalist for a short do...

Thousands of student visas cancelled by the government! Legal residents snatched off the streets by masked agents, detained and deported! Federal research grants to universities scrapped! The government asserting a special right to oversee academic departments and curriculum decisions!

The frequency of events like these across the country are dizzying, and the pace is accelerating. Academic freedom is in the cross-hairs. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people pe...