#37: George Katsiaficas on Eros, Revolution, and Gen Z

For this week's podcast we're joined by George Katsiaficas, author of the classic texts The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (1987) and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (1997), as well as the more recent collections Gen Z Makes History (2025) and Eros and Revolution (2024). We discuss his idea of the eros effect and what we can learn from following global waves of uprisings. We think together about where both radical consciousness and self-organization comes from, as well as the danger of a Thanatos effect, where we see a contagion of confusion, depression, and nihilism. LINKS:--Gen Z Makes History: https://www.eroseffect.com/gen-z-makes-history--George Katsiaficas's Website: https://www.eroseffect.com/George Katsiaficas is a social theorist who is known for his many writings on social movements, 1968, and Asian uprisings. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he coedited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. He was a professor of humanities and sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston for more than three decades. Katsiaficas is a militant researcher, who lives amongst and collaborates with the people he writes about and sees his research as advancing global activism, not simply describing or analyzing it.