Cosmopod

Daniel Newman urges patience and caution in the face of current political turmoil. Cliff Connolly reads the article aloud.

Donald and Lydia join human rights lawyer and fellow Marxist Anne McShane to discuss her recent PhD thesis on the Zhenotdel, the women's department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They discuss the origins of the Zhenotdel, how it attempted to solve the shortcomings of the women's movement in the second international and its role in women's liberation after the October Revolution. The conversation then pivots to the specific focus of Anne's thesis: the changing role the Zhenotdel played in women's emancipation in the Central Asian Republics. They discuss how the Zhenotdel related to and incorporated indigenous women into organizing, the Central Committee's takeover of Zhenotdel policy that resulted in the hujum campaign of mass unveiling and the disastrous reaction that followed, how this campaign can be contextualized within the rise of Stalinist policies. They end the episode with the final dissolution of the Zhetnodel in 1930 and the sanitization of Nadezhda Krupskaya's figure.

-----

Anne's research interest is in women's liberation. Check out her Weekly Worker pieces among which we highlight: A barometer of Progress, Soviet Russia and Women's emancipation, The Will to Liberate and How Women's Protests Launched the Revolution. Her PhD thesis can be found in the University of Glasgow's repository.

----

Picture of a mass veil-burning from Uzbekistan (1920s). Originally from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, obtained from Wikipedia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 socialist science fiction both succeed and fail in capturing the intricacies of gender and social reproduction.

------

Read Virginia's article "Economic Circulations: Blood-Based Systems of Value in Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star" here: https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/02/01/economic-circulations-blood-based-systems-of-value-in-alexander-bogdanovs-red-star/

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 those tactics to apply in the present day.

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 problems that other socialist societies such as Yugoslavia or the Brezhnev USSR would face, and how his contributions add to the debate around cybernetical socialism today.

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 dialectical relationship of organism and environment, and how this can be applied for a socialist project, as well as addressing the critiques of Moore's work from other ecosocialist schools.