This week we entered the archives and poured through the codices and scrolls containing the wisdom of past episodes to give you this curated trash can of ideology. We highlighted some themes from the past six years of podcasting that we thought were worth underscoring and discussed relevance and how our ideas have changed.

Referenced Materials:
Our Underlying Philosophy of Dialectical Pessimism

• S1/Ep5: Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will
• S1/Ep26: The Proper Amount of Bumming People Out
• S4/Ep7: Death of The Left
• S5/Ep21: Pessimism is an Optimism: Revisiting Pessimism

Making Sense of Our Past

• S1/Ep27: Children of the Counterrevolution
• S3/Ep12: The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Enlightenment
• S3/Ep22: Stillborn Utopia -- The Unfulfilled Potential of the Republic
• S4/Ep3: Tragedy of American Socialism #1

Rethinking What It Means To “Be” Revolutionary

• S1/Ep10: The Right to the City: Changing the City, to Change Ourselves
• S2/Ep8: We Would Prefer Not To: Against a Politics of Catharsis
• S5/Ep15: The Legacy of William Morris
• S6/Ep15: Antifascism of Fools

A Willingness to Abandon Our Older Trajectory

• S4/Ep20: Labor Theory of Apocalypse
• S6/Ep5: One Plus One Is Three: The Poverty of "Third Campism"
• S6/Ep16: The Boys Figure Out Which Marxist Tendency is Correct
• S6/Ep19: To Front or Not to Front: The Question of "Popular Frontism"

The Major Obstacles/Challenges We Face

• S3/Ep5: Happiness Industry Socialism
• S3*/Ep17: Everything Is Recuperated
• S5/Ep9: You're Not Making Liberals Socialist, You're Just Making Socialists More Liberal
• S5/Ep19: The Dialectic of Degrowth: Socialists and the Burden of Ecological Disaster

Our Deep Skepticism/Hostility Toward Techno-Solutions

• S1/Ep31: The Future Has Been Canceled -- Stalling of Culture/Technology in a Decaying Society
• S2/Ep2: Partially Automated Regular Communism
• S2/Ep5: Socialism Without Sacrifice & Other Fake Futures We are Against
• S4/Ep4: No Ethical Technical Innovation Under Capitalism

Looking Ahead

• S4/Ep11: Marxism in Dialogue With Christianity
• S5/Ep12: The Dialectic of Apotheosis -- Lunacharsky and the Godbuilders
• S5/Ep16: Bathing in the Warm Stream
• S6/Ep22: Real Grouchy Old Man Hours: What's Left of the Left?

Regrettable Reading List

• The Red Jacobins: Thermidor & The Russian Revolution in 1921
• Party As Articulator
• The Tragedy of the Worker
• Revolution: An Intellectual History
• Left Wing Melancholia
• Excremental Happiness: From Neurotic Hedonism to Dialectical Pessimism

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This is an old episode of our friend Andrew's podcast that was recorded a few years ago. The podcast is now defunct, but we thought y'all deserved to hear it.

In this episode Jason and Andrew watched and discussed Guy Debord's 1974 film version of The Society of the Spectacle.

Enjoy and Happy New Year.

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*the actual episode*

We are joined again by our official France correspondent, Matthew. Matthew is a veteran of American Trot sectarian organizing and the labor movement who lives in France and is more intimately involved in the happenings than we are.
We discuss the failure of the New Popular Front, the ham-fisted triumph of Macron, and the death throes of the French political system.

French government ​of Michel Barnier toppled ​after losing no-confidence vote – as it happened
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/04/france-government-vote-no-confidence-barnier-lepen-europe-live

Macron ally François Bayrou appointed new French prime minister
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/13/macron-ally-francois-bayrou-appointed-new-french-prime-minister

How fall of government is proof that France's Fifth Republic 'no longer works'
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/politique/071224/how-fall-government-proof-frances-fifth-republic-no-longer-works?utm_source=article_offert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TRANSAC&utm_content=&utm_term=&xtor=EPR-1013-%5Barticle-offert%5D&M_BT=9679632603774

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Soldiering on and finishing Chapter 3 of Bauer's excellent Marxist analysis of the nation.

Read along with us:
https://libcom.org/article/question-nationalities-and-social-democracy-otto-bauer

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This week, we read and discussed Eley and Blackbourn's indispensable discussion of the Sonderweg, or special path, of German history. It is often said that Germany's path to the Holocaust begins with the failure of the bourgeois revolution to take hold. This book posits a top-down Bonapartist "revolution" led by Otto von Bismarck which thoroughly bourgeoisified German society from the top to the bottom.

Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984; Oxford Academic, 3 Oct. 2011)

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Kicking off Year VII, Chris and Ben are joined by Daniel Saunders to discuss Herbert McCabe's Class Struggle and Christian Love. The intention was also to cover pieces by Dennis Turner and Terry Eagleton but time got away from them, so Daniel will have to return again...

Herbert McCabe: The Class Struggle and Christian Love https://www.christiansocialism.com/2020/05/14/herbert-mccabe-class-struggle-capitalism-marxism-christianity/

More of Daniel:

Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism & Christianity
https://www.buzzsprout.com/220523/episodes/14978167-ideology-fetishism-apophaticism-marxist-criticism-and-christianity-with-daniel-saunders

Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism and Christianity:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nbfr.12642

And Here:
https://daniel-saunders.com/

Mentioned Materials:

The Slant Manifesto
https://archive.org/details/SlantManifestoCatholicsAndTheLeft

The New Blackfriars Journal
https://www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk/study/new-blackfriars-journal/

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The long-awaited part two of our year six in review episode. We kick it off with a little geopolitical discussion but get around to discussing our personal lives and the podcast.

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We are back at it again talking decadence theory with Varn. This week, we dig into Samir Amin's piece from Monthly Review.

We discussed the following materials:

Morley, Neville. "Decadence as a Theory of History." New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp.573-585

Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory?
https://libcom.org/library/decadence-aufheben-2

Revolution or Decadence?
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/05/01/revolution-or-decadence/

Check out Varn Vlog Here

https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog

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