Good evening, Current Affairs listeners. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. My guest, today is writer, sociologist, Eric Blanc. He is the author of Red State Revolt,

The Teacher Strikes in Working Class Politics, available from Verso,

and he is also, most recently, the author of a new article in The Nation of Minneapolis Educators Strike for the Common Good.

Eric, nice to talk to you. Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm a big fan of current affairs.

Well, thank you.

Current Affairs is a big fan of you.

And we did an event with you in New Orleans a couple of years ago that was wonderful with the New Orleans DSA about when your book came out.

But yeah, tell me, so what is going on in Minneapolis right now?

You contacted me and you said there's something important.

You've got to, you know, we've got to talk about it.

There's no, everyone's distracted with Russia and Ukraine.

And so nobody's looking at important things in the labor movement right now,

but there are important things going on.

So tell us.

Yeah, thousands of educators, meaning teachers and support staff, are on strike in Minneapolis,

fighting for things like smaller class sizes, a living wage for support staff, and just all

around decent conditions in schools, which don't exist.

And so it's important both because of just kind of like the moral dignity of the students and

educators involved, but it's also politically important nationally because education has just been put

on the rocks from the pandemic. And what happens in Minneapolis is going to have a lot of impacts

on this kind of state of the teachers movement, education movement, and labor movement, and the future

public education. Yeah. Well, we might, and labor movement, and the future of public education.

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