Last week, we read and discussed The End of Policing by Alex Vitale in order to get a better grasp on the history of the police, over-policing, the failure of technocratic reforms, and some of the ideas for the uses of funds after police defunding (be it partial or wholesale). Whether or not the revolt against the police will produce lasting systematic reform reform remains to be seen, but we have to admit that the conversation about how to fix the problem of policing has begun on favorable foot...
Jun 22, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 19
While we were reading about Covid 19 in Salvage last week, an uprising against police brutality began in Minneapolis. We didn't (don't) know what to make of it yet, but it sure did take over a discussion that was supposed to be about pestilence and the left's role in troll vigilantism. Listen to our uninformed and incomplete takes from day one of the unrest. We have a much more complete and thought out take coming for you in a few days. We Are All Unclean- Salvage Editorial Collective https://sa...
Jun 11, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 18
We are joined by veteran of the podcast wars, C. Derick Varn, for his third appearance on the show, to talk a little about historical Bonapartism and a little more about contemporary Bonapartism. We talked about the contemporary left's perceived need to seek out a Bonapartist savior and drift further and further from the utopian horizons we once sought. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ Music: Cro Mags- Hard Times Pop the Left- Wi...
May 26, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Marxism had always contained within it a multiplicity of variations and is possessed, in equal parts, of the potential to be used for illumination and obfuscation. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the early responses of Marxists to fascism. In our third installment of our series on the history of fascism, we dive into some more Marxist theories of fascism; specifically the German and Austrian Social Democratic Theories, Trotsky and Thalheimer, and then wrap up with a bit of Horkheimer....
May 18, 2020•1 hr 37 min•Season 2Ep. 16
This week we sat down with Patrick of the Radical Thoughts Podcast to talk about Walter Benjamin and his ideas of myth and rationality, capitalism as religion, and a number of other disconnected things that were just fun to talk about. Please check out Radical Thoughts as they read through the entire Zero Books Radical Thinkers series and subscribe to their patreon for bonus episodes. https://www.patreon.com/radicalthoughts/posts Capitalism and Religion- https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2018/06/0...
May 04, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 2Ep. 15
This week we have something special for you guys, our very first Lost Horizons Network collective podcast release, Here We Are Together, Still...After All. Join Chris and Jason from The Regrettable Century, Adam from Red Library, and Neil from the From78 Podcast as we talk about what it means to be dialectically pessimistic. The Lost Horizons Network Podcast: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c3bf81dd Red Library Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/redlibrary/posts From78 Podcast https://www.patreon.co...
Apr 27, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 14
On Easter Monday, April 24 1916, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army mustered in Dublin and declared the formation of the Irish Republic. Marxist and Irish Republican, James Conolly, led the Irish Citizen's Army in hopes that the Easter Rising would touch off a revolution in Ireland that would lead to the establishment of a Workers' Republic, the death of the British Empire, and the beginning of a socialist world revolution. Over a century later, Ireland is still ruled i...
Apr 24, 2020•1 hr 34 min•Season 2Ep. 13
This week, Jenny, Chris, and Jason read and discussed Jodi Dean's essay: The Four Theses on the Comrade. A comrade is much more than an identity that one adopts. It is an ethos, an ideal for the collective reorganization of the world. We talk about how this is a concept that the left has abandoned and needs to find again. Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the full episode. Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show...
Apr 22, 2020•3 min•Season 2Ep. 12
The old world is dying and a new one is being created before our eyes. Thus far, the left has had little if any input into this process. If we don't insert ourselves into the conversation with great haste, a much worse version of our current hellscape will be the outcome. What kind of project will be necessary to salvage the useful pieces of detritus needed to build a better world? To that end, we sat down with our good friend Michael to talk about how to build a better post-apocalyptic world. T...
Apr 13, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Season 2Ep. 12
(PART II) The birth pangs of the bourgeois epoch included a multi faceted opposition in the form of romanticism. This reaction lauded humanity's lost connection to the natural world, to spirituality, and to a forgotten sense of communal life. While it is easy to point out the romantic strain in rightist political ideologies, we often overlook the one that has existed in Marxism since the beginning. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the tide of modernity . Durham: Duke Universi...
Apr 06, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Jenny, Chris, and Jason sat down with our friend, rank and file union organizer, and CPUSA member Brad to talk about electoralism and what the hell to do next. Please head over to our Patreon and subscribe for the insanely low fee of $2 a month to hear the rest. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show...
Apr 03, 2020•6 min•Season 2Ep. 9
The birth pangs of the bourgeois epoch included a multi faceted opposition in the form of romanticism. This reaction lauded humanity's lost connection to the natural world, to spirituality, and to a forgotten sense of communal life. While it is easy to point out the romantic strain in rightist political ideologies, we often overlook the one that has existed in Marxism since the beginning. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the tide of modernity . Durham: Duke University Press, ...
Mar 30, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Our good friend and regular contributor to the show, Steven, brings his legal expertise and knowledge of early soviet law history to this weeks episode. We discuss the Evgeny Pashukanis, Pytor Stuchka, and their contributions to legal theory in the days just after the revolution. There was a debate among legal theorists of the time about whether it is possible to construct a socialist legal system and how the law should be used in a socialist society. Ultimately, Pashukanis would wind up on the ...
Mar 16, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 9
We had an episode planned where we were going to talk about the Bolsheviks and Early Soviet Law, but our main law dude (Steven from Supreme Leap Forward) got deathly ill and bailed on us. So, we are unlocked one of our Patreon episodes. Please forgive us, but trust that we have some good stuff coming up. Sometimes doing something (anything!) is much worse than doing nothing; we really need to figure out when that is. We read and thought and talked about an article that admonishes us to think and...
Mar 02, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 8
This week we continue our discussion of Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia by Darko Suvin with our podcast network comrade, Adam from Red Library. Please Check out and subscribe to Red Library and From 78 and be on the lookout for more updates concerning the Lost Horizons Network. Red Library: A Political Education Podcast for Today's Left From 78 Podcast Suvin, Darko. Splendour, misery, and possibilities : an X-ray of socialist Yugoslavia . Leiden Boston: Bri...
Feb 17, 2020•50 min•Season 2Ep. 7
We read and discussed Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia by Darko Suvin with Adam from Red Library. This incredibly dense book was a wealth of theoretical and historical knowledge about one of our favorite subjects, Yugoslavia. The SFRY defies neat categorization and the more we learn about it the more questions we have about the process of transition to communism, workers' self management, radical democracy, markets, and state socialism. It is the perfect med...
Feb 10, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 6
In this episode we revisit the topic of Fully Automated Luxury Communism with our friend Annaliese. While we are already on the record opposing the viability and desirability of a socialism without sacrifice, we decided to make a few more critiques we didn't think of making last time, but we also talk a bit about what kinds of futures we would like to see, the nature of work and leisure time, and how much it would suck to have robots do everything. Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on he...
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 5
Head over to Patreon and sign up for $2 a month to hear the second part of the discussion. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show
Jan 15, 2020•3 min
The British left was epically owned last month in one of the crappiest election results in several generations. While the reaction to this defeat has been largely one of despair and feelings of rudderlessness, we make the case that this is just one in a long line of defeats we will inevitably suffer. Unless we gird ourselves for defeat with a dialectical pessimism, there's no way we will last long enough to make a real difference. Head over to Patreon and sign up for $2 a month to hear the secon...
Jan 12, 2020•56 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Wherein we continue our discussion with Derick. Head on over tour our Patreon and sign up for $2 a month to check it out. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show
Jan 06, 2020•4 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The boys--all the good ones--sat down with C. Derick Varn of Pop the Left and the Symptomatic Redness (which can be found on the Zero Books podcast feed) to talk about Socialism in One Country and/or Socialist Internationalism. We tackled the topic that has plagued the workers' movement from the early days of the Socialist International and wrapped it up quite nicely. We have answered the national question and can now proceed forward to proletarian victory. Please check out Part II of our discus...
Jan 01, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Apparently, fully automated luxury communism is more than just a meme. We read some articles about it and decided to have a discussion about its merits and shortfalls. Is a post labor society something that is possible or desirable? Is technology really shifting the base of society in a direction that makes fully automated luxury communism more likely? How do we define the concept of luxury and is it really something we'd like perpetuate? Do we as a civilization, species, or planet even have tim...
Dec 09, 2019•1 hr 24 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Sometimes doing something is much worse than doing nothing; we need to figure out when that is. We read and thought and talked about an article that admonishes us to think and talk and read before acting. We have to stand against a politics of catharsis, a politics that does nothing but makes us feel like we are making a difference. Check out the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show...
Dec 05, 2019•5 min
Marxism had always contained within it a multiplicity of variations and is possessed, in equal parts, the potential to be used for illumination and obfuscation. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the early responses of Marxists to fascism. In our second installment of our series on the history of fascism, we dive into some Marxist theories of fascism. Our primary source of info for this episode is this wonderful book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1233-marxists-in-the-face-of-fasc...
Nov 25, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 1
It is the first birthday of the Regrettable Century! We spent the better part of an hour reflecting on our proud moments, regrets, things we changed our minds about (or didn't), and where we would like to go in the future. We've got some heavy material coming up, so enjoy this comparatively light fare. Music: Every Day is Halloween - Ministry Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show...
Nov 11, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 34
The movement for proletarian self emancipation is at a low ebb, but in a testament to how stupid and bad the world is, Democrats, Republicans, and European post-fascists have ramped up their rhetorical attacks on the pale ghost of the specter of communism. Anti-communism has always been the stand-in ideology for racist authoritarianism and it serves the same purpose now in a world without a global movement to scare the bourgeoisie. Liberals, attempting to stem a nascent socialist movement, would...
Oct 23, 2019•43 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Steven from The Supreme Leap Forward is back to talk about the KKKriminal INjustice CIStem of the United $nakes of AmeriKKKa. We discuss the courts, restorative justice, twitter pileons/call out culture, and a little about Soviet jurisprudence. Steven's essay mentioned in the episode: Understanding Crime Under Capitalism: A Critique of American Criminal Justice and Introduction to Marxist Jurisprudence- Steven Gilmore The Works of Evegny Pshukanis: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/ind...
Oct 07, 2019•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 32
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations, both in the realm of cultural and -- apparently -- technological production. Culture has crawled to a halt, its progress replaced by advances in methods of distribution. Technology is bogged down in a cycle of adding additional cameras to the iphone. Has capitalism outlived its progressive potential? (The TLDR is yes) Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTsk...
Sep 16, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Check out some Real Nerd Hours when Chris and Jason have a discussion about a not very well known article from an obscure Trotskyist journal written around a decade ago... It generated a little bit of a buzz, but was mostly ignored. We think that was a mistake and we are going to tell you all about why you should care about the decisions of the 10th party congress. https://www.patreon.com/posts/red-jacobins-and-29448338?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare Send us ...
Sep 09, 2019•4 min
"Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring....
Sep 02, 2019•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 30
