The Museum of the Revolution in Perquín, El Salvador, tells the stories of the Marxist guerrillas that fought a bloodthirsty, US-backed regime during the country’s civil war in the 1980s and early ’90s. If you visit, the ex-guerrilla staffers will, between harrowing tales of armed combat, proudly recount how they ran their radio station, Radio Venceremos, by recording in caves and running radio transmitters up trees in the jungle.

The Salvadoran military was obsessed with destroying the station, which broadcast stories of repression and resistance that you couldn’t hear anywhere else. One US-trained Salvadoran commander once commented, “so long as we don’t finish off this Radio Venceremos, we’ll always have a scorpion up our ass.” (Legend has it that the guerrillas finished off that same officer by luring him into a trap: he thought he had finally captured the radio transmitter from a group of fleeing guerrillas and could thus destroy the station; the transmitter was actually a bomb, exploding inside his helicopter.)

The stakes for most leftist broad- casters today aren’t anywhere near as high. But the spoken word has always been a key medium for transmitting socialist ideas. There are millions of people who might find 3,000-word longform essays a daunting starting point, but could be reached through compelling oratory and debate. That’s why we have Jacobin Radio.