The old forms of the left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a dialectical pessimism and develop a Marxist salvage project capable of putting up a good fight as the world burns around us. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 8 days 16 hours 4 minutes
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episode 21: We Are All Dying: The Twittering Machine (Part III of III)
This week we discuss the final chapters of the Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour in the conclusion of our three part series.
Seymour's book is an extremely black-pilling look into the trolls, e-celebs, pile-ons, live streamed suicide, and corporate surveillance that make up the social media cesspool.
Ultimately we conclude that the internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Seymour, Richard. The twittering machine...
episode 22: Stillborn Utopia: The Unfulfilled Potential of the Republic
We sat down with our old friend, comrade, and fellow veteran of Trotskist hyperactivsm to discuss the concept of the Republic and whether or not is still useful to Marxist organizing/theorizing. The era of the bourgeois republic has been a simultaneous process of creation and destruction, of liberation and enslavement...
episode 23: The Specter of Common Ruin: Theories of Capitalist Decadence
It doesn't take much to convince someone that the capitalist system has exhausted its progressive potential and is in a state of decline. There are a number of theories that the prolonged state of crisis of the capitalist system is evidence that capitalism has peaked and is on its way out...
episode 24: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (With Red Library): Part I of III
We teamed up with Adam from Red Library in a farewell reading series on Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee. Magee forges a path tread by few in arguing that Hegel was decisively influenced by western esotericism. In this weeks episode we trace the roots of Hermetic tradition from a syncretic cult that blended Greek and Egyptian ideas of magic and spirituality, through figures like Paracelsus, Agrippa, Bruno, Baader, and Böhme...
episode 25: Let America be America Again... For Once
This week we continue our series on republicanism and Marxism by discussing the complicated legacy of the American Revolution. Like the bourgeois project as a whole, the historical consequences of the American Revolution have had mixed results. Simultaneously spurring on the cause of human freedom and stifling it, the American Revolution was pregnant with a creative and destructive spirit...
episode 26: Treating the Symptoms of Capitalism: Mental Illness, Therapy, Psychedelics, and Mysticism
This week we sat down with Lost Horizons comrade and Red Library Alumnus, Adam to talk about mental illness as a social problem, but we ended up talking about a lot more. We cover the less than stellar performance of SSRIs, Hezychasm, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, communism, exercise, and therapy. Ultimately we concluded that there is no liberation from mental illness without the abolition of capitalism.
Turn Illness Into a Weapon
https://www.indybay...
episode 27: The Internet and its Consequences...
This week we discuss an article by Ben Davis in Salvage Journal titled The Anarchist in the Network which discusses the pitfalls of organizing in the age of the internet. The extreme atomization of our society has been exacerbated by our social media addictions and our methods of organization against capitalism have suffered as a result. While calls for protests may go viral and enormous crowds may turn out, they lack to coherence needed to bring sustained pressure to bear...
episode 28: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (With Red Library): Part II of III
We teamed up with Adam from Red Library, and our comrade Mir from Sweden, in a farewell reading series on Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee. Magee forges a path tread by few in arguing that Hegel was decisively influenced by western esotericism.
In this weeks episode we dive into Magee's explanation of Hegel's Mythology of Reason and the Phenomenology of the Spirit as a Hermetic initiation rite.
Magee, Glenn A...
episode 29: The Uses and Abuses of Christopher Lasch - With C Derick Varn (Part I of II)
Christopher Lasch is a figure that draws strong reactions from people all over the political spectrum. Lasch's later work spoke of a growing chasm between liberal managerial elites and the traditional working class (endearing him to some conservatives), but his older work falls solidly within the tradition of homegrown American socialist politics. Our friend and comrade, C...
episode 30: The Uses and Abuses of Christopher Lasch - With C Derick Varn (Part II of II)
Christopher Lasch is a figure that draws strong reactions from people all over the political spectrum. Lasch's later work spoke of a growing chasm between liberal managerial elites and the traditional working class (endearing him to some conservatives), but his older work falls solidly within the tradition of homegrown American socialist politics. Our friend and comrade, C...