Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Chris Cutrone and Spencer Leonard are two of the founding and early members of the Platypus Affiliated Society . What do the origins of the Platypus Affiliated Society, postmodernism's influence on Marxism, and the current state of the left have in common? Join us as we delve into these topics and more with Chris and Spencer, two of the three founders of Platypus. Their fascinating journey began with a re...
Jun 12, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 182
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. What if the university experience and the humanities education system are flawed at their core? Join us in our conversation with Maxximillian Seijo, ex-academic and former host of the Superstructure podcast and Money on the Left, as we unpack the perils of academia, the exploitation of graduate student labor, and the quest for novelty in the humanities. Together, we delve into the complexities of language...
Jun 08, 2023•2 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 181
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Carl Eugene Stroud is a language educator and militant social anarchist. Are you ready to explore the world of education, militancy, and multilingualism? Join me as I sit down with Carl Eugene Straude, language teacher and anarchist militant, for an eye-opening conversation on the challenges and importance of translating texts from other languages for English speakers. From examining unique discourse patt...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 181
What happens when we explore the tension between Marxism and psychoanalysis through the lens of Phillip Reiff and Christopher Lasch's work and its relation to Henry Miller and John Updike? Join us in this thought-provoking conversation with our guest Daniel Tutt, a renowned scholar of Marxism and psychoanalysis. We'll discuss the Frankfurt School, the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, and Lasch's unique perspective from Anglo-American Freudianism as a corrective to forms of Freudian Marxis...
May 29, 2023•1 hr 58 min•Season 1Ep. 180
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Amani Wells-Onyioha is a political expert, civil rights advocate, and thought leader. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Amani found her passion for politics during her time at the University of North Texas. After the murder of Trayvon Martin, Amani understood stopping something like that from happening again would require systematic and institutional change, so she committed herself to make an impact on h...
May 25, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 179
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Josiah Rector is an urban historian specializing in 20th-century U.S. urban environmental history, the history of the environmental justice movement, and labor history. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Wayne State University, and his dissertation received the Urban History Association’s Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History, in 2016. He was subsequently a visiting professor of U.S. ...
May 18, 2023•1 hr 45 min•Season 1Ep. 178
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. The Subset of Theoretical Practice is a collective research project and a political collective, bringing together researchers interested in investigating contemporary politics, with a special focus on developing new tools for political organization. While these two sides overlap, they are not the same, as we are engaged in theoretical work together and invested in building a formal framework and a politic...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 179
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Colin Drumm has a Ph.D. History of Consciousness. He writes and teaches on monetary history, medieval political economy, and the relationship between political economy and philosophy. He is an organizer of the Mimbres School . We discuss misconceptions of the history of money and its effects on contemporary understandings of money and politics. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip...
May 11, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 178
While the introduction music is that of Varn Vlog on this podcaster, this series will be simultaneously released on both the Varn Vlog podcast feed and the Regrettable Century podcast feed . This is a long-running series we are doing on understanding social technologies, relationships of production, and how we get here: i.e. what is the social and class history of the past. In this episode, we discuss Evgeny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason." We specifically focus on the revisions to ...
May 08, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 177
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer who writes on international politics, religion, culture, and humanism. We discuss the following articles: https://www.sublationmag.com/post/stalingrad https://unherd.com/2021/03/the-demise-of-political-blackness/ https://areomagazine.com/2022/11/09/in-defence-of-internationalism/ Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) In...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 176
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Jason Myles is a musician, writer, and host of the This is Revolution Podcast . We discuss a lot of things, but the theme of branding as politics runs throughout. We also look at Myles's recent articles for Sublation Magazine: https://www.sublationmag.com/post/is-the-contemporary-left-a-lifestyle-brand https://www.sublationmag.com/post/trump-is-having-his-chinese-democracy-moment Crew: Host: C. Derick Var...
May 01, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 175
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Ben Burgis is an adjunct philosophy professor at Morehouse College, a columnist for Jacobin Magazine, and the author of several books, most recently "Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters." We talk about the legacy of G.A. Cohen and analytical Marxism. Cohen is actually interesting for an analytical Marxist because he was not as dependent on neoclassical econ...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 174
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. This episode is a co-production with Strange Matters Magazine. Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief of The Real News Network in Baltimore and the host of Working People. We discuss his recently released book, "The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke" (Or 2022). This is an article that introduces the book: https://strangematters.coop/max-alvarez-work-of-...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 173
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Jason Myles is a musician, writer, and host of the This is Revolution Podcast . We discuss a lot of things, but the theme of branding as politics runs throughout. We also look at Myles's recent articles for Sublation Magazine: https://www.sublationmag.com/post/is-the-contemporary-left-a-lifestyle-brand https://www.sublationmag.com/post/trump-is-having-his-chinese-democracy-moment Crew: Host: C. Derick Var...
Apr 17, 2023•2 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 172
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. This is part 2 of 2. Adnan Husain is both a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian. His early work focused on religious phenomena and social imagination in Medieval Catholicism and Islam, particularly on Franciscan spiritual and Sufi mystical traditions. He now principally studies and teaches on the cross-cultural and inter-religious encounters among the Muslims, Christians and Jews of Latin Chris...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 171
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. This is part 1 of 2. Adnan Husain is both a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian. His early work focused on religious phenomena and social imagination in Medieval Catholicism and Islam, particularly on Franciscan spiritual and Sufi mystical traditions. He now principally studies and teaches on the cross-cultural and inter-religious encounters among the Muslims, Christians and Jews of Latin Chris...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 170
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Jeremy Gross is a cybernetic tikkun olamunist living north of Boston, Massachusetts. He is interested in collaborative workspaces that incorporate peer-to-peer and empathetic practices to subsume alienated labor. We chat about h is paper on Stafford Beer . But we also talk about bad incentive structures in tech, misunderstanding machine learning, and limits of AI. We go into Jewish and Yiddish culture as ...
Apr 03, 2023•2 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 169
Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He has written for publications like Jacobin, LA Review of Books, and Non-site. We discuss his recent article on the work of Robert Putnam. Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake. Intro Video Design...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 168
P.H. Higgins is a long-time friend of the show, the co-host of the Radical Thoughts Podcast , and a scholar on social theory. We discuss the work of John Levi Martin and, in particular his book, "The Explanation of Social Action." Please support our patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake. Intro Video Desig...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 167
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Susanna Kleeman (@susannakleeman) is a writer from London who works in digital tech. Her first book, MY REJECTIONS (2020) is a short memoir of hubris, humiliation, and triumph against the odds. She published the novel Twice in 2021 (Zero Books, 2021). She is the host of Fatal Dates and more information on her work can be found here . Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebe...
Mar 20, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 166
While the introduction music is that of Varn Vlog on this podcaster, this series will be simultaneously released on both the Varn Vlog podcast feed and the Regrettable Century podcast feed . This is a long-running series we are doing on understanding social technologies, relationships of production, and how we get here: i.e. what is the social and class history of the past. In this episode, we discuss Evgeny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason." We specifically focus on the sections on t...
Mar 19, 2023•2 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 165
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Nicolas D. Villarreal is a writer and analyst on political economy and theory. He has contributed work to Palladium Magazine and Cosmonaut Magazine. He is the founder of Casper Forum . We talk about what may be going on with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. NOTE: BOTH OF US THINK THIS MAY BE BIGGER THAN THE NUMBERS INDICATED ON SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2023. That said, we think in the main most of this analys...
Mar 16, 2023•2 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 164
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Andrew Hartman is Professor of History at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in U.S. intellectual, cultural, and political history, as well as courses in the philosophy of history, historiography, and pedagogy. Hartman co-hosted a podcast dedicated to politics, ideas, and history, titled "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids." He is the author of "A War for the Soul of America: A History of the C...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 163
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Daniel Bessner is currently an Associate Professor in International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a Contributing Editor at Jacobin. In 2019-2020, he served as a foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Daniel is an intellectual historian of U.S. foreign relations. He is the author of...
Mar 06, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 162
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Eric Draitser is an independent political analyst and host of CounterPunch Radio . You can find his exclusive content including articles, podcasts, audio commentaries, poetry, and more at patreon.com/ericdraitser. You can follow him on Twitter @stopimperialism. We talk about many, many things including early Soviet art, xenophobia against Russia, and more cultural politics. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audi...
Mar 02, 2023•1 hr 57 min•Season 1Ep. 161
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Sudip Bhattacharya is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, an activist, and a writer. He researches the history of organizing and labor movement. We discuss his article, The Usefulness of POC identity and its limits (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/25/the-usefulness-of-the-poc-identity-and-its-limits/) (Pay-walled), as well as the need and limits of inter-racial organizing. Crew: Host: C. Derick ...
Feb 27, 2023•2 hr 47 min•Season 1Ep. 160
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Todd McGowan is a Professor of English at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author of 15 books, including Universality and Identity Politics (2020), Emancipation After Hegel (2019), and Capitalism and Desire (2016). We discuss his recent book for Sublation Media, "Enjoyment: Left and Right." Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) Branding Design: Djene Ba...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 159
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Sam Kangarloo is a Modern Monetary Theory, aka MMT, Subject Matter Expert and an Anarchist who spent several years studying MMT and stress testing the validity of it thru challenges to the 1st and 2nd wave communities of MMT economics professionals. Today we're focusing on why MMT's framework is not necessarily Nationalist and what its Revolutionary implications might be. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio ...
Feb 20, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 159
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Rob is the host of the Right Podcast . We talk about the misuse of 19th-century politics and the misunderstanding of American populism. The misappropriation of this history is pernicious. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) Branding Design: Djene Bajalan and C. Derick Varn Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake. Intro Videos Design: Jason Myles , Dejene Balajan ...
Feb 16, 2023•2 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 158
Please support our Patreon. For early and ad-free episodes, members-only content, and more. Nadim is a co-host of 99 Zu Eins (Note: episodes are in English and German, but more often in German.) We discuss the situation of congressional and parliamentary socialism and how things don't seem to be changing much despite the "return" of socialism in much of the anglophone world. Crew: Host: C. Derick Varn Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur ) Branding Design: Djene Bajalan and C. De...
Feb 13, 2023•2 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 157
