Ep 27: Hydra rising. With Marcus Rediker & Nandita Sharma (English).

De Verbranders

Today, we have two guests: Marcus Rediker, a distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburg, and Nandita Sharma, a professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Marcus Rediker has spent a lifetime studying oceans rather than lands, immersing himself in the worlds of sailors, pirates, and the enslaved. As he explains in the episode, it was the labor of seafaring people that knitted together the continents, enabling the rise of global capitalism. Yet these people—brought together on ships and in ports—not only generated immense profits for the wealthy; they also developed what he calls “projects of their own,” often in opposition to the interests of rulers. This self-activity of ordinary people across the Atlantic lies at the heart of his work. We then turn to The Many-Headed Hydra, a book Marcus co-authored with Peter Linebaugh in 2000. In it, Marcus and Peter use the metaphor of the Hydra and Hercules to connect revolutionary struggles and counter-revolutionary efforts across centuries and continents. In The Many-Headed Hydra, radical religious groups struggling against enclosures in 17th-century England appear alongside, and interlinked with, the uprisings of enslaved people that swept through the Caribbean and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Time and again, we see that mobility is essential for capital accumulation. But it also emerges as a problem for those in power once people start “projects of their own,” prompting intense repression and efforts to fracture revolutionary coalitions. One of these technologies of division, Marcus explains, is citizenship. Marcus’s work has much to offer those of us who struggle against borders today. As Nandita explains in the second part of the episode, borders and legal status divide us from one another. As vital resources continue to be extracted and privatized, and investments in technologies of war increase, what does it mean to practice a politics radically oriented toward life? How do we strengthen our connections to one another? How do we build the body of the Hydra so that our movements interlink and regenerate? These are some of the questions we discuss. We recorded this discussion in October 2024, as the Israeli state continues to kill and starve people in Gaza on an unimaginable scale, its onslaught now also reaching deeper into the West Bank and Lebanon. We must continue to do whatever we can to stop this mass killing, to resist the ongoing expropriation of people from their lands, and to resist the border regimes that trap those who want to leave. At the end of the conversation, Marcus and Nandita offer hope at a time that does not always seem very hopeful. People all over the world live and love in ways that reach far beyond the orders imposed on us—and they do so under the most difficult and unjust of circumstances. Something in these radical visions of freedom, in these struggles for life, practised in different times and distant places, connects us to one another. This reminds us of something simple, something we already know: that we all breathe in the common wind.