“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
-- Antonio Gramsci
The old forms of the Left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a Dialectical Pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism.
A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
Check us out on Patreon for regular Patron Book Clubs, Regrettable Geopolitics updates, Real Nerd Hours, and more...
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Episodes
Wednesday Jan 08, 2025
Wednesday Jan 08, 2025
This week we entered the archives and poured through the codices and scrolls containing the wisdom of past episodes to give you this curated trash can of Ideology. We highlighted some themes from the past six years of podcasting that we thought were worth underscoring and how our ideas may have changed...
Our Underlying Philosophy of Dialectical Pessimism
- S1/Ep5: Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will
- S1/Ep26: The Proper Amount of Bumming People Out
- S4/Ep7: Death of The Left
- S5/Ep21: Pessimism is an Optimism: Revisiting Pessimism
Making Sense of Our Past
- S1/Ep27: Children of the Counterrevolution
- S3/Ep12: The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Enlightenment
- S3/Ep22: The Unfulfilled Potential of the Republic
- S4/Ep3: The Tragedy of American Socialism
Rethinking What It Means To “Be” Revolutionary
- S1/Ep18: The Right to the City
- S2/Ep8: We Would Prefer Not To
- S5/Ep15: The Legacy of William Morris
- S6/Ep15: The Antifascism of Fools
A Willingness to Abandon Our Older Trajectory
- S4/Ep20: Labor Theory of Apocalypse
- S6/Ep5: One Plus One Is Three
- S6/Ep16: The Boys Figure Out Which Marxist Tendency is Correct
- S6/Ep19: To Front or Not to Front
The Major Obstacles/Challenges We Face
- S3/Ep5: Happiness Industry Socialism
- S3/Ep17: Everything Is Recuperated
- S5/Ep9: You're Not Making Liberals Socialist...
- S5/Ep19: The Dialectic of Degrowth
Our Deep Skepticism/Hostility Toward Techno-Solutions
- S1/Ep31: The Future Has Been Canceled
- S2/Ep2: Partially Automated Regular Communism
- S2/Ep5: Socialism Without Sacrifice...
- S4/Ep4: No Ethical Technical Innovation Under Capitalism
Looking Ahead
- S4/Ep11: Marxism in Dialogue With Christianity
- S5/Ep12: The Dialectic of Apotheosis
- S5/Ep16: Bathing in the Warm Stream
- S6/Ep22: Real Grouchy Old Man Hours
Regrettable Reading List:
- The Red Jacobins: Thermidor & The Russian Revolution in 1921
- Party As Articulator
- The Tragedy of the Worker
- Revolution: An Intellectual History
- Left Wing Melancholia
- Excremental Happiness: From Neurotic Hedonism to Dialectical Pessimism
- Liquid Modernity
- The True and Only Heaven: Progress & Its Critics
- The Twittering Machine
- Hegel & The Hermetic Tradition
Thursday Jan 02, 2025
Thursday Jan 02, 2025
This is an old episode of our friend Andrew's podcast that was recorded a few years ago. The podcast is now defunct, but we thought y'all deserved to hear it.
In this episode Jason and Andrew watched and discussed Guy Debord's 1974 film version of The Society of the Spectacle.
Enjoy and Happy New Year.
Wednesday Dec 25, 2024
Wednesday Dec 25, 2024
We are joined again by our official France correspondent, Matthew. Matthew is a veteran of American Trot sectarian organizing and the labor movement who lives in France and is more intimately involved in the happenings than we are.
We discuss the failure of the popular front, the ham-fisted triumph of Macron, and the death throes of the French political system.
Thursday Dec 19, 2024
Thursday Dec 19, 2024
Soldiering on and finishing Chapter 3 of Bauer's excellent Marxist analysis of the nation.
Read along with us:
https://libcom.org/article/question-nationalities-and-social-democracy-otto-bauer
Friday Dec 13, 2024
Friday Dec 13, 2024
This week, we read and discussed Eley and Blackbourn's indispensable discussion of the Sonderweg, or special path, of German history. It is often said that Germany's path to the Holocaust begins with the failure of the bourgeois revolution to take hold. This book posits a top-down Bonapartist "revolution" led by Otto von Bismarck which thoroughly bourgeoisified German society from the top to the bottom.
Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984; Oxford Academic, 3 Oct. 2011)
Wednesday Dec 04, 2024
Wednesday Dec 04, 2024
Kicking off Year VII, Chris and Ben are joined by Daniel Saunders to discuss Herbert McCabe's Class Struggle and Christian Love. The intention was also to cover pieces by Dennis Turner and Terry Eagleton but time got away from them, so Daniel will have to return again...
Herbert McCabe: The Class Struggle and Christian Love https://www.christiansocialism.com/2020/05/14/herbert-mccabe-class-struggle-capitalism-marxism-christianity/
More of Daniel:
Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism & Christianity
https://www.buzzsprout.com/220523/episodes/14978167-ideology-fetishism-apophaticism-marxist-criticism-and-christianity-with-daniel-saunders
Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism and Christianity:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nbfr.12642
And Here:
https://daniel-saunders.com/
Mentioned Materials:
The Slant Manifesto
https://archive.org/details/SlantManifestoCatholicsAndTheLeft
The New Blackfriars Journal
https://www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk/study/new-blackfriars-journal/
Science Impregnated With History: Marxism and Reason (With Chris Manno)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/220523/episodes/4672121-science-impregnated-with-history-marxism-and-reason-with-chris-manno.mp3?download=true
Wednesday Nov 27, 2024
Wednesday Nov 27, 2024
The long-awaited part two of our year six in review episode. We kick it off with a little geopolitical discussion but get around to discussing our personal lives and the podcast.
Wednesday Nov 20, 2024
Wednesday Nov 20, 2024
We are back at it again talking decadence theory with Varn. This week, we dig into Samir Amin's piece from Monthly Review.
We discussed the following materials:
Morley, Neville. "Decadence as a Theory of History." New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp.573-585
Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory?
https://libcom.org/library/decadence-aufheben-2
Revolution or Decadence?
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/05/01/revolution-or-decadence/
Check out Varn Vlog Here
https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog
Wednesday Nov 13, 2024
Wednesday Nov 13, 2024
As we wrap up another year of podcasting, we offer our expert opinions on everything that sucks about the world. Stay tuned for part II.
Thursday Nov 07, 2024
Thursday Nov 07, 2024
The long march through the text continues as the gang tackles chapter three.
Read along here:
https://libcom.org/article/question-nationalities-and-social-democracy-otto-bauer