This Wreckage

Jamie and Andy sit down with the great Marxist historian, author, activist and urban theorist Mike Davis to review the year that was. Topics include the California wildfires, the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and that wet fart of an election. Why is everything so terrible and what should anti-capitalist organizers be focusing on going into 2021? All will be revealed.

Articles referenced:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/mike-davis-trench-warfare

https://lithub.com/how-a-pandemic-happens-we-knew-this-was-coming/

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/california-fire-drought-climate/

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-malibu-burn-20181114-story.html

Outro song: Michael Martin Murphy - Wildfire

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Santa visits us to deck the halls with boughs of... holly. We talk about the left "negationists" and their defenders like Noam Chomsky, the Faurrison affair and connection with current culture wars about free speech, and the Bordigist critique at their heart of their milieu. Scholar of religious discrimination Dave Silverberg then presents his thesis that Marx's On the Jewish Question is misread as an antisemitic text. Finally, we draw some conclusions about labor party expulsions and other contemporary controversies surrounding antisemitism. Merry Christmas!

Original Bordigist essay: http://libcom.org/library/auschwitz-big-alibi

Introduction to French Ultra-Left and Faurisson: https://libcom.org/library/john-gray-introduction-question-state

Thread on Bordiga, Dauve, Guillaume and Auschwitz: https://libcom.org/forums/theory/bordigism-anti-fascism-01032012

Anti-semitism and National Socialism - Moishe Postone https://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-national-socialism-moishe-postone

Closing song: Weird Al - The Night Santa Went Crazy

In order to discuss the appalling ways that poor white people are portrayed in the United States, we had to have on Tarence (@tarenceray) from the Trillbilly Workers Party. We all watched JD Vance's execrable 'Hillbilly Elegy' so you don't have to.

Out of this came a great discussion about deindustrialization, rural poverty, the opioid epidemic and media portrayals of that figure of derision and fear, 'the white working class'. What changes to US political economy caused widespread immiseration over the last 50 years in places like Appalachia? How have politics failed the workers in these communities? And what dark visions do the Charles Murrays and JD Vances of the world have for a solution to the rural poverty problem?

Outro song: Total Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Heart - Bonnie Dauvé

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