Zero Books: Advancing Conversations

C Derick Varn is back this week to discuss a historic debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley that took place at Cambridge University in 1965. For those of you who don’t know, James Baldwin was a literary giant who wrote works such as Notes of a Native Son and No Name in the Street and William F. Buckley was the renowned founder and editor of the National Review along with being a columnist and television interviewer on his program Firing Line. The topic Baldwin and Buckley debated in 1965 was Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro.

I should also point out that, at the end of this episode, Derick Varn and I agree to have our own debate sometime in the future. Given how old this recording is, that debate should be coming up soon.

Thanks go out to Alexander W, Tayler F, Francesco A, Zac C, and Haas D for supporting this podcast through Patreon. When you support Zero Books on Patreon you get access to a second podcast, the Inside Zero Books podcast, every week. Inside Zero Books features conversations that you won’t hear on the main feed. This last weekend, for instance, Ankur Dnyanmote was the guest and we discussed the music of Pink Floyd. The week before that Derick Varn was the guest and we discussed an essay by the socialist intellectual Hal Draper entitled “The Anatomy of a MicroSect.”

Rob Larson is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington State and the author of Bleakonomics. He's written broadly, including for In These Times, Dollars & Sense and Jacobin, and appeared on Alternative Radio and other programs and he’s the author of the book Capitalism Vs. Freedom which is out now from Zero Books. 

I want to thank Ben W, Neil, Luke O, and horacio along with 360 others for supporting the Zero Books podcast on Patreon. Patreon supporters get access to the the Inside Zero Books, Symptomatic Redness, and the Alternatives podcasts. Counting Zero Squared, Patreon supporters get access to two podcasts every week and are helping us continue to produce our youtube channel and other online projects like our Capital reading group.

Luke Turner is the guest on this week's podcast. An artist based in London, Turner is one-third of the artist trio LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, alongside Shia LaBeouf and Nastja Säde Rönkkö. The co-editor of the aesthetics and culture website Notes on Metamodernism, he penned The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011.

If you aren’t supporting this podcast through the Inside Zero Books Patreon page you’re missing out on a second podcast every week. For five dollars a month you’ll receive a second Zero Books podcast every weekend.

This week instead of an interview we're bringing you the audio from the Zero Books panel "Surplus Value vs. Surplus Enjoyment." The participants in the debate included Vakhtang Gomelauri from Occupy Psychoanalysis, Mia Vallet from CUNY, Douglas Lain from Zero Books, and Ashley Frawley from Zero Books and Swansea University. The moderator for the panel was Pete Dolack author of It's Not Over.

Here's the description of the panel that ran in the Left Forum program.

There are many definitions of "surplus value" on the left, perhaps too many. This debate/panel discussion will take a look at two approaches to the surplus created under capitalism. One version of surplus value comes to us from Marx and his law of value, while the other emerged from Jacques Lacan's return to Freud. What is the relationship between Lacan and his followers psychoanalytic reinterpretation of Marx and Marx's original theory? Can one hold with both Marx and Lacan?

Bernard Schiff is an Emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and the man responsible for helping Professor Jordan Peterson get hired some 20 years ago. Professor Schiff is also the author of a piece entitled “I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous” that was recently published in the Toronto Star newspaper, and the guest on this week’s podcast.

This week you’ll hear from JG Michael who co-hosts the Alternatives podcast with Derick Varn and hosts his own podcast called Parallax Views as he interviews Schiff on why Jordan Peterson is dangerous.

Thanks go out to Erik TK, Liam M, Alex Mirro and 337 other supporters on Patreon who get access to the Inside Zero Books podcast every weekend. Coming up this weekend Patrons will get to hear the panel discussion on video games and in future weeks I’ll be releasing the Surplus Value vs. Surplus Enjoyment debate on the main feed.

Pam Nogales is a PhD History Candidate at New York University, a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, and a co-host of the Shit Platypus Says podcast, and she stops by the Zero Books podcast this week to discuss the revolutions of 1848 and the leftist tradition.

Zero Books will be hosting three-panel discussions at the Left Forum this weekend all of them on Saturday. Video Games Technology and Revolution will be in Room 1.100 from Noon to 1:50pm, Surplus Value vs Surplus Enjoyment will be in Room 1.115 from 2pm to 3:50pm, and Teaching Wildcat Strikes will be in room 1.71 from 4pm to 5:50. If you’re going to the Left Forum please do catch our panels.

Also, the next Zero Books youtube video will be out tomorrow and it’ll feature an animated version of the text I’ll be reading at the video game panel, so if you can’t make it the Left Forum you can still check out what I have to say about video games.

John David Ebert is the author of nearly 20 books, a youtuber responsible for over 500 videos on philosophy, and a blogger at cultural-discourse.com. This week he is also the guest on this podcast. We discuss his essay On Hypermodernity.

We want to encourage you to check out Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies. It is absolutely still relevant to today's political scene and she is planning to return to the Zero Books podcast to discuss the ideas of Christopher Lasch. If you haven’t read Kill All Normies now is the time. Pick it up from an online store, at your a local bookstore or at your local library.

Finally, if you aren’t supporting this podcast through the Inside Zero Books Patreon page you’re missing out on a second podcast every week. I’d urge you to go ahead and take the plunge. For five dollars a month you’ll receive a second Zero Books podcast every weekend.

Stand-up comic Jake Flores tweeted out a joke thread about killing ICE officers and got a visit from Homeland Security who were not so amused. Jake stops by to tell the tale of his visit and reflect on the question of free speech in America.

From Jake's webpage:

Jake Flores was born in Austin TX in a dumpster full of Chinese food after an old jacket had sex with another old jacket. The jackets named him Jake, after the fact that they were jackets. Then in 2007 he was in the finals of NBC's Stand Up For Diversity. He's has been doing stand up for slightly longer than the current booming glut of millennial iPhone wielding irony zealots so he feels a completely undeserved sense of superiority for being an android wielding sincerity zealot. He yelled a lot about his drinking problem and then in 2014 Stand Up Records! decided to secretly record one of his yelling sessions and it became an album called Humours (Stand Up! Records). It did pretty well so he moved to New York to start yelling at a professional level. The Jackets are very proud of him.

Michael Brooks is the co-host of the Majority Report and the host of The Michael Brooks Show and this week he’s returning to the Zero Books podcast to discuss a debate between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. The debate about “racism, identity politics, intellectual honesty, and the controversy over Harris’s podcast with Charles Murray” was released as episode 123 of the Waking Up podcast. Brooks and I discuss both who won and what epistemological problem was at the center of the debate.

Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is absolutely still a book worth reading and that she is planning to return to the Zero Books podcast to discuss the ideas of Christopher Lasch in June. If you haven’t read Kill All Normies now is the time. Pick it up from an online store, at your a local bookstore or at your local library.

Also, the newest Zero Books youtube video is entitled The Intellectual Dark Web is Afraid of Marx. If you like this podcast you should check out the Zero Books youtube channel.

Finally, if you aren’t supporting this podcast through the Inside Zero Books Patreon page you’re missing out on a second podcast every week. I’d urge you to go ahead and take the plunge. For five dollars a month you’ll receive a second Zero Books podcast every weekend.

Eric Wilson is the author of The Republic of Cthulhu and the guest on this special edition of Alternatives. Alternatives is a monthly podcast that you'll usually find on the Inside Zero Books patreon feed. This episode is being released on all of the Zero Books feeds in an effort to entice people to support us on Patreon.

From the book jacket of The Republic of Cthulhu:

If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work of H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) as an example of the relevance of subversive literature—in this case, cosmic horror and the weird tale—to the parapolitical criminologist.