“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.
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Episodes
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
We return to the concept of the republic, this time with our comrade Brad who is a member of the CPUSA, a union activist, and first class republic respecter. Brad is here to make a pitch for the continuation of a revolutionary tradition that is steeped in revolutionary republicanism.
Pettit, Philip. 2012. On the People’s Terms : A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bill of Rights Socialism and the Future of the Republic
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Monday Feb 13, 2023
This week we're discussing A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev which is a not very good book that advances a thesis that doesn't need to exist. Enjoy!
Zubok, V M. 2009. A Failed Empire : The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press.
Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the whole episode and join the Discord to take part in the discussions.
Monday Feb 06, 2023
Monday Feb 06, 2023
No Royal Road is back!
Varn joins Chris and Jason to discuss Evegny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason." This is the first of what will probably be a multi part series.
Check out Varn Vlog here:
https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog
Sunday Jan 29, 2023
Sunday Jan 29, 2023
Steven from Supreme Leap Forward is back and this time he's bringing his thoughts on natural law. For this weeks episode we read from Olúfémi Táíwò's Legal Naturalism and an article by Anna Lukina to prepare for this discussion.
Olúfémi Táíwò. 2015. Legal Naturalism : A Marxist Theory of Law. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
https://legalform.blog/2020/07/30/kelsen-on-marx-engels-and-natural-law-anna-lukina/?fbclid=IwAR3qomVFwcvNttJqNJJKDhJcyrRPLbF4kGnBpplao3C-BsS3EfjZp01Ajcw
Music: Tupac- Fuck the Law
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Happy New Year and welcome to a new series where Chris talks about books he read in grad school. This week we are reading and discussing Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan by Artemy Kalinovsky.
Kalinovsky, Artemy M. 2018. Laboratory of Socialist Development : Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the whole episode and join the Discord to take part in the discussions.
Support the show (http://patreon.com/theregrettablecentury)
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
We got together with our old friend and comrade from the Trot sect days to talk about why it is that the nominally socialist left is so obsessed with liberal culture war discourse.
Music: Embrace- Money
Monday Dec 19, 2022
Monday Dec 19, 2022
Happy December, I just finished my semester and finally got around to mastering this episode that we recorded a couple months ago. We are revisiting this masterwork of left sociology by heavyweight Polish intellectual and dissident Marxist, Zygmunt Bauman who is a harsh critic of late capitalist modernity.
From the publisher's note:
"Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural worlds. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live again in a time of fear. Whether its the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of indiscriminate terrorist attacks, we live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment. Fear is the name we give to our uncertainty in the face of the dangers that characterize our liquid modern age, to our ignorance of what the threat is and our incapacity to determine what can and can't be done to counter it."
We cover the two middle chapters of the book in this episode.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2006. Liquid Fear. Cambridge U.A.: Polity Press.
Music: Dimitri Shostakovich- Waltz No. 2
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
We are back with part three of our discussion of Rodrigo Nunes' new book on Verso. This week we talk about chapters three and four.
Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the whole episode and join the Discord to take part in the discussions.
Support the show (http://patreon.com/theregrettablecentury)
Tuesday Nov 22, 2022
Tuesday Nov 22, 2022
We just turned four!
Looks like we have successfully fooled you into listening to us for another year. In honor of exiting the anal stage and entering our phallic stage of childhood psychosexual development as a podcast, we decided to do an episode about it.
Please enjoy the very last episode of year four. Year five will be worse for humanity and likely better for our podcast. See you in season five!
Music: The Dead Kennedys- Kill The Poor
Sunday Nov 06, 2022
Sunday Nov 06, 2022
This week we continued our discussion of The Tragedy of the Worker by the Salvage Collective and discussed the implications of looming climate collapse. Once again we ask: what kind of world do you want to build in the post-apocalyptic wasteland?
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3727-the-tragedy-of-the-worker
Music: Bad Religion- Modern Man