Renzo Llorente engages with contemporary advocates of Democratic Socialism and argues that they ultimately fail to demarcate between liberal and socialist visions of democracy, resulting in capitulation to the liberal status quo. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy and Djamil join Sam Parry, author of The Ugly Economics of the Beautiful Game for a discussion on how capitalism interacts with the sport most of the world knows as football. We talk about the many ways in which capitalism interacts with international football from a world-systems perspective including how the periphery ends up supplying talent to the economic core, the tendencies towards vertical integration, the stickiness of capital, the historic patterns of club ownership, and the recen...
Daniel Tutt looks to the philosophy of Georg Lukács and his critique of bourgeois irrationalism to explicate the role of intellectuals and worldviews in the class struggle. Read By: Allen Lanterman Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Combining the insights of previous scholarship with information gathered from Bureau of Investigation (BOI, predecessor of the FBI) surveillance documents, Ian Szabo presents a new angle on the history of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), illustrating the organizations’ particular synthesis of Black radical politics and Marxism, as well as revealing the racial fantasy through which contemporaneous mainstream U.S. media and the state understood its methods and goals. Read by: Luke Intro Music:...
Luke and Donald join Robert Ovetz, author of We the Elites: Why the Constitution Serves the Few , for a discussion on the Constitution as a potent obstacle to political and social democracy in the United States. They begin with a discussion about the history and context of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the various anxieties the Framers held toward indigenous resistance, slave rebellions, and debtor revolts. They explore the document’s inner workings, including the various minoritaria...
Charlie Frank gives an overview of the forms of social mobilization that developed as a response to the AIDS pandemic as well as what lessons the left can draw from this chapter of history. Read by Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy joins Colin Darch , author of several books on Mozambique and curator of Mozambique History Net for a discussion on Mozambique from the colonial period to the unraveling of the socialist period. We discuss Portuguese colonialism and the economic system the country had, the liberation movement FRELIMO with attention to its origins and its historical leader Eduardo Mondlane, before talking about Samora Machel, the first leader of an independent Mozambique. We discuss the Machel period and its...
The Cibcom Collective take aim at domestic realism, arguing that feminist planning of the domestic economy is necessary to the communist project. This is a translation of an article originally published in Jacobin América Latina. Read By: Luke Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Nodrada explores the tensions and resonances between Marxism and Indigenous thought, putting the writings of Native theorists such as Vine Deloria Jr., Luther Standing Bear, Winona LaDuke, and many others in dialogue with those of Marx. Read By: Aliyah Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy joins Victor Petrov, author of Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain for a discussion on The People's Republic of Bulgaria and its computing industry and offshoots. They discuss the history of socialism in Bulgaria, how it changed the country's productive basis from an agricultural nation to one that could produce an all-Bulgarian satellite in 1981 and be a worldwide leader of computing. We talk about how the computing i...
Isaac joins Kei and Leila from Stop Cop City/Defend Atlanta Forest for a discussion on the movement, its strategy and its ultimate goals. They discuss what brought them into the movement, what the Weelaunee coalition and the Atlanta Police Foundation are, how the movement uses three prongs to aim for victory, and how it relates to the political landscape in Atlanta. They also touch on the centrality of care in a movement which has seen someone murdered, as well as the links to contemporary ecoso...
Cibcom Collective's Response to Luke P Read by: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy joins Robert Biel, author of The Entropy of Capitalism, The New Imperialism and Sustainable Food Systems for a discussion on systems approaches to analyzing capitalism. They cover Robert's earlier work on entropy and capitalism, how the capitalist system externalizes disorder on the periphery, the role of China in the world-system, the potentialities of agriculture and much more.
This letter is in response to Conquering Democracy, Abolishing Political Representation by the Cibcom Collective. I appreciated the comrades’ thought-provoking work and the opportunity to clarify my ideas in response. I have several peripheral agreements regarding the importance of democracy and the utility of workers’ councils, and one fundamental disagreement about the nature of the democratic republic. Read by: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Fore...
Rudy and Harry join Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization for a discussion on Rodrigo's approach to thinking about the problem of organization. We cover the need to move beyond certain dichotomies like vertical and horizontal, self-organized vs organized from the outside, the need for understanding organization ecologically, the problem of organizational fitness, and discuss the potential applications of the ideas in this book....
Annie joins Elisabeth Armstrong, author of Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949 for a discussion of the Beijing conference and the international women's movement of the period. They discuss the composition and politics of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the key figures in the WIDF who played a role in the Asian Women’s Conference, the different rhetorical strategies formulated through the conference, including revolutionary motherhood and...
A recent Jacobin piece by Chris Maisano argues that building “a Left that matters” requires focusing on Democratic Party electoral work, but we must be clear about the consequence of such an orientation: a middle-class Left that remains disconnected from the proletariat and abandons the fundamentals of Marxism. By Jacque Erie. Read By: Keir Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
The Cibcom Collective argues that Communist society will require an overcoming of political representation in favor of forms of direct democracy like sortition and referendum. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy joins Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and George Martin, authors of Urban Food Production for Ecosocialism: Cultivating the City for a discussion on urban agriculture. We talk about the history of food and the city, the ways the Global North/South divide is reflected in food, before focusing on the authors' fieldwork on what the political uses as well as limitations of urban food gardens are. We discuss examples in Ghana, Italy, the US, China and Cuba, and what is done right and wrong in each of t...
Transcription and commentary by SA Reed. Read by Cliff Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Amelia, RK, Harry and Rudy sit down for a discussion on systems approaches to ecology using as a basis H. T. Odum's Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy . We talk about Odum's innovations in the field of ecology, his ideas about the hierarchies of energy and matter, how to use Odum's framework to extend Marxist analysis of society towards constructing an eco-socialist program, and use that to critically evaluate several current political proposals...
links to read and sign resolutions here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXgSds8qpoyqfwY-wXfs00htSRExsofCdvgLDRN-_Zn82IsQ/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc_9gWNbmroeapzEBICuZotHoLElzUalW_jD84jxqqkVF8L-w/viewform
Gil Schaeffer responds to Ben Grove’s “ Twelve-Step Program for Democrat Addiction ” and its arguments about the need for a mass party, critiquing Mike Macnair, Ben Lewis and Lars Lih’s concept of Erfurtian Marxism. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Shuvu Bhattarai of the Marxist Unity Group outlines an overview of the recent history of DSA and finds a demarcation between pro-party and anti-party tendencies, calling on those sympathetic to the former to join the fight for a mass socialist party in the United States of America. Read by: Aliyah Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. Part 2 of Shvu's response to Lazare will deal with building a United Fro...
Anton joins Robert Knox for a discussion of Marxist approaches to law, with a focus on international law. We discuss critical legal studies, international law and how it compares to other branches of law, its origins and how it has evolved through the years focusing on the cases of Haiti, the USSR and decolonization movement, and law and neocolonialism. We also discuss how Marxists can approach law in general through principled opportunism....
Harry Zehner analyzes the discourse and politics of the YIMBY-NIMBY divide and argues that socialists should reject this binary entirely. Read By: Aliyah Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Rudy, Carson, Eric and Rob sit down to talk about the only socialist state in the Arab peninsula, and arguably in the Arab world: The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, also known as South Yemen. We discuss its origins, the struggles of the left factions to pursue a socialist path, its economic policies and political turns, as well as the factors that led to its demise through reunification with the north. We also briefly talk about the revival of South Yemeni sentiment during the present wa...
In a comparative study of Austro-Marxism, the French Socialist movement, and Bolshevism, Medway Baker argues for the left to seek unity around a programme of constitutional disloyalty. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.
Isaac and Jackson join David Austin, author of Fear of a Black Nation and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution , for a discussion of the Afro-Caribbean diasporic left, focusing on Montreal in the late 60s. They discuss the influence of the U.S. black power movement on the world, the black left in Montreal, and in particular the confluence between Caribbean nationalism and Quebec nationalism. They discuss the Congress of Black Writers, Walter Rodney's prese...
Cliff and Isaac join Jesse Olsavsky, author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 , for a discussion on his book on the early abolitionist movement. They discuss the textbook history of abolition, and how this masks the role of runaways and other radicals substituting them for a white middle-class leadership, what Vigilance Committees were and how they acted, the exchange of ideas between different social groups in t...
