Marxist Center Double Feature

Cosmopod

Two articles from the archive pertaining to MC. The first is Building Revolution in the USA: Notes on Marxist Center Conference, 2018, by Parker McQueeney and Donald Parkinson. The second article is For the Unity of Marxists with the Dispossessed: The Bolsheviks and the State, 1912-1917, by Medway Baker. Cliff Connolly reads both articles aloud.

No Replacement For The Marxist Theory Of Revolution

Cosmopod

Gabriel Palcic argues that various attempts in academia to develop theories of revolution as alternatives to Marx’s theory of revolution and historical materialism only serve to disguise the centrality of class contradiction in these events. Cliff Connolly reads the article aloud.

Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy with Red Library

Cosmopod

Remi and Niko join Comrade Adam from Red Library to discuss Kohei Saito's Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy: Karl Marx's Ecosocialism. We discuss the concept of metabolism, Marx's evolution of thought on ecology being the core realm of capitalist crisis, agricultural chemistry, the role of a Marxist ecosocialist perspective to stop the destruction of capital across the planet, and much more even including Žižek's thoughts on ecology! Note: The episode ends a bit abruptly as technology bailed on us in the final moments.

The Practical Policy of Revolutionary Defeatism

Cosmopod

Matthew Strupp lays out the politics of revolutionary defeatism in contrast to the approaches of third-campism and third-worldism. Cliff Connolly reads the article aloud.

Different Horizons of Science Fiction under Socialism with Virginia Conn

Cosmopod

Rudy and Medway are joined by recently graduated Dr. Virginia Conn to discuss about her research on science fiction in the USSR, the German Democratic Republic and China. We discuss what the purpose of science fiction under socialism is, the continuities and ruptures of science fiction in the People's Republic of China during it's diverse political periods, how the new Soviet citizen contrasted with the Chinese new citizen, the figure of Bogdanov within Russian Cosmism, how the particularities of the GDR reflected in its Science Fiction, and how many male-written stories in...

From Trade-Union Consciousness to Socialist Consciousness with Chris Townsend

Cosmopod

Three of our writers are joined by veteran union organizer Chris Townsend to discuss labor organizing across history and in the present day. Chris, Remi, Peter and Annie will explore how to do what Lenin emphasized had to be done: how do we inject the political 'good news' of socialism into the workers' economistic struggle? They recapitulate how the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party situated itself in the labor organizing of the early 1900s, how the 'third period' of the Comintern laid the basis of the formation of the CIO in the US, and attempt to extrapolate what can we learn from...

Che Guevara and the Economics of Socialist Transition

Cosmopod

Christian, Donald and Rudy sit down to discuss Che Guevara's program for a socialist transition using Helen Yaffe's book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution as a background. We visit the economic "Great Debate" of Cuba in the early 1960s, the different approaches to using the law of value for socialist transformation, Che's critique of market socialism, his model of Cuba as a single socialist factory, and how this model compares to contemporary approaches such as the People's Republic of Walmart. We emphasize how Che's humanistic outlook in molding new humans prefigured some of the...

Capitalism in the Web of Life

Cosmopod

Join us for the second installment in Cosmonaut's critically acclaimed ecology series to discuss Jason Moore's "Capitalism in the Web of Life". Niko, Matthew and Remi discuss how this work merges concepts from Marxist ecology and world-systems analysis to reveal how capitalism organizes nature as a whole oikeios, and how this sets limits to capitalist accumulation once "the Four Cheaps" (energy, food, work and raw materials) become scarce and capitalism is forced to shift to new regimes of accumulation. The team talks about how Moore's concepts of oikeios and capitalism-in-nature extends the...

Unmasking Social Construction with Djamil Lakhdar

Cosmopod

Donald and Rudy are joined by Djamil Lakhdar to discuss Ian Hacking's book The Social Construction of What?. Written during the "science wars", Hacking intervenes in the debate between strict constructivism and strict realism. Hacking reframes the types of questions to be asked when interrogating the social origin of something, and clarifies the different approaches we can take when we interrogate the construction of a concept. We start off with natural and social sciences, and continue to the application of these questions to today's world. Is physics socially constructed? What does it mean...

Food, Capitalism and the Necessity of a Socialist Program

Cosmopod

Capitalist food production is based on ecological destruction, imperialism, inhumane labor practices, and the degradation of human health. A socialist program that guarantees healthy food for all is the only alternative. By Katie Paige, Kelly Alana, and Renato Flores. Cliff Connolly reads the article aloud.