Emancipations Podcast

What are the best theoretical frameworks for understanding class politics? Marx offers an understanding of class as tied to relations of productive labor and property ownership in capitalist society. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers an understanding of class which goes beyond Marx in many ways, offering a richer and more varied idea of class as a cultural formation that generates a field of power. Can Marx and Bourdieu be reconciled? Can they be combined? We are joined by sociologist Lisa Mckenzie to discuss the best ways to theorize class, the working class, class politics and more.

We are joined by socialist author Darren Roso to discuss his forthcoming book Daniel Bensaid: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager which is the first major study of Bensaïd's thought. Daniel Bensaïd completed his Ph.D. on Lenin right as May 68 took off and his work has contributed to contemporary Marxist philosophy and practice in important ways. In this fascinating interview, Roso describes the key ideas and the thrust of Bensaïd's renewal of Marxism starting in the 1980s to his death in 2010.

Slavoj Žižek is a provocative intellectual, constantly taking positions on social and political issues that upset convention and lead him to face derision from both the right and the left. Given the often erratic stances that he takes, from his support for the Ukraine war, to Donald Trump in 2016, some have wondered whether the Giant of Ljubljana has lost his way in recent times. We are joined by Žižek scholar Matthew Flisfeder for a discussion on how to understand the core of Žižek's thought, and how to remain true to his project and method even when he may waver from it.

Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Postmodern Theory and “Blade Runner” and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film.

We continue our conversation on the meaning of revolution with C. Derick Varn, by turning to the theoretical basis of "post" Marxist thinkers from the Althusserian school, Laclau and Mouffe, Hardt and Negri and Alain Badiou. We discuss some of the pitfalls of these contemporary Marxist theorists and the basis by which they revise core tenets from Marx. We also discuss new class theories on today's left and how they relate to Marx's class theory and different theories of the intellectual in socialist thought.

To download the reading list we have created for this series please go here. 

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Is revolution dead? The left is divided over how to make revolution, and many Marxist and post-Marxist theorists have developed radically new conceptions of revolution that are often highly divergent from how Marx, Engels and Second International Marxists dealt with revolution. Our age is notoriously known as post-revolutionary, and liberal realism has set in so deep that we have seemed to have lost touch with the truths of Marxist insights into revolution. We are experiencing a resurgence of political and cultural radicalism but in the context of the absence of working-class radicalism as expressed through socialist parties, mass parties and labour unions. 

To help us understand the history and the meaning of revolution, both in its practical and theoretical valences, we are joined by scholar, poet and podcaster C. Derick Varn. C. Derick Varn is the host of the politics and culture podcast Varn Vlog where he probes socialist politics and offers invaluable insights for the left. Please subscribe to his show at @VarnVlog.

To get access to the reading list that we have created around this two-part series, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups.

Agnes Smedley is an American writer and socialist heroine born in 1892 in Missouri. Her family relocated all across the American west including near the Ludlow Massacre of coal mining workers. Smedley managed to escape the conditions of poverty she was born into and went on to become one of the most important personalities of revolutionary socialism in the first part of the 20th century. Smedley's notoriety has been larger in Russia and China than in the United States because her books were banned during the Red Scare in the 1950s - 1970. She was witness to the Chinese Revolution where she spent the longest period of time embedded with the Chinese Red Army, longer than any other western journalist.

We are joined by Stephen MacKinnon, a historian of modern China and the author of Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical to discuss the remarkable life of Agnes Smedley. In this interview, host Daniel Tutt and Stephen MacKinnon discuss Smedley's life and legacy and speculate into a number of open questions about her death, her possible status as a Russian spy and more.

We welcome the brilliant poet and thinker Ali Benziane. Dr. Benziane is an autodidactic philosopher currently working closely with friend of the show, the famous French actor and philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. We discuss some philosophical and metaphysical perspectives on the post-covid world, looking at Ali's notion of a new mechanism of global power that  he calls "psychopouvoir" (psycho-power) after the late french philosopher Bernard Stiegler. 

We discuss his intellectual influences, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, the meaning of tragedy, parody, Deleuze's work, fascism and philosophy, traditionalism, and Ali's love for the French metaphysician René Guénon.

We welcome writer and Marxist thinker Richard Seymour back onto the show for a spirited discussion on new currents in Marxist thinking. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the contradictions and tensions between the concept of "degrowth communism", coined by eco-socialist thinker Kohei Saito, to another trend in Marxist and socialist thinking which is encapsulated by the name of "neo-Kautskyism", or the general tendency for a more productivist and working-class organized direction of socialist politics. We also discuss the legacy of Althusserian Marxism, class politics, the PMC debate and quagmire as well as Richard's intellectual trajectory, idealism and materialism and faith and spirituality.

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We are joined by Mary L. Edwards to discuss her new book Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others. We discuss Sartre's concept of bad faith, the in-itself and the for-itself and the challenge that his philosophy poses to psychoanalysis. We also discuss Sartre's psychobiographies on Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert and what these works have to offer to psychoanalytic practice and theory.

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Link to Mary's book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sartres...

Mary Louise Edwards is a teacher in philosophy at Cardiff University, School of English, Communication and Philosophy. Mary researches and teaches existentialism, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of imagination.

In this episode, I expound on Lukács's later work and the meaning of irrationalism. I analyze Marxist reason in contradistinction to neo-Kantian thought and touch on what is most distinctive about philosophy for Marx and Engels and how Marx breaks with both Kant and Hegel. From a Marxist point of view, the practical aim of philosophy is to bring about human freedom and human freedom in capitalist society requires the activation and the organization of the proletariat to realize and overcome class domination.

 References:

Lukács, Georg The Destruction of Reason Verso Books, 2021 Lukács, Georg History and Class Consciousness MIT Press, 1992 Lukács, Georg "Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics" from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014 Lukács, Georg "Intellectual Workers’ and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership” from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014 Lenin, Vladimir "What Is to Be Done" https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd Frederick C. Beiser The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 Oxford University Press, 2014 Rockmore, Tom Irrationalism: Lukacs and the Marxist View of Reason Temple University Press, 1991 Check out our symposium on Lukács' The Destruction of Reason (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE03jn2k3GYAWlu20REPquu3-R-_Snbef)

Supplemental reading:

Tutt, Daniel "The Question of Worldview and Class Struggle in Philosophy: On the Relevance of Lukács' The Destruction of Reason" Cosmonaut Magazine February, 2022 https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/02/the-question-of-worldview-and-class-struggle-in-philosophy-on-the-relevance-of-lukacss-worldview-marxism-and-the-destruction-of-reason

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