Class Unity

Christian Parenti talks with Class Unity about the “compatible left”, so-called Wokeness, contemporary politics, and institutions like the CIA. Parenti is the author of “Radical Hamilton” (2020) and “Tropic of Chaos” (2011). You can find his article here: https://catalyst-journal.com/2024/06/… You can find Class Unity here: https://classunity.org Please consider making a donation or joining today!

Michael Heinrich talks to Class Unity about Marx’s Capital, Politics, and the contemporary Left.  

Welcome to Transmissions Episode 14! In this episode, Jamal, Heph, and Daniel discuss the recent political victory of George Galloway, the Workers Party, and Joti Brar on “Class Unity”, and the prospects for class politics at present. On the Class Unity podcast channel you can find Transmissions, our podcast for topical discussions and interviews, and PoliEdPod, the podcast featuring great content from our Political Education Committee. If you are interested in this discussion, consider joining Class Unity today, and get involved in our Political Education Committee. Please follow us on your podcast app of choice, and leave a kind review! https://classunity.org Tweets by Class_Unity

Welcome to Episode 8 or CU’s PoliEdPod series! In this episode, Catherine Liu joins us for a discussion of recent debates about the relation between Republican and Democratic parties and labor. For background, listeners may want to check out the articles which initiated this debate, by Sorab Amari and Dustin Guastella, along with a contribution by Liu herself: Sohrab Ahmari, “How the GOP Can Mend Fences With Unions,” https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-the-gop-can-mend-fences-with-unions/ Dustin Guastella, “Can the Republican Party Become A Vehicle for Equality?,” https://damagemag.com/2023/12/07/can-the-republican-party-become-a-vehicle-for-equality/ Catherine Liu, “Self Defeating Personality Disorder: some thoughts about the Ahmari/Guastella debate,” https://cliuanon.substack.com/p/self-defeating-personality-disorder?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 A video recording of this episode can be found at the link below: —//— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5EEdzUdlcE&t=31s

One of the worlds leading Marxist economists talks to us about the recent problems of inflation, class politics, and the global economy. Check out Lapavitsas’s latest collaborative efforts here: “The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony,” with the EReNSEP Writing Collective (2023): https://www.versobooks.com/products/2727-the-state-of-capitalism “The Cost of Living Crisis: (and how to get out of it),” with James Meadway and Doug Nicholls (2023): https://www.versobooks.com/products/3146-the-cost-of-living-crisis You can listen to the audio-only version of this event in our podcast feed, or you can watch the livestream via YouTube, below:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apucd9kUKg&t=71s  

Hello friends! Welcome to another episode of Class Unity ‘Transmissions’!  Our guest for this episode is none other than James A. Smith, co-host with David Slavick of The Popular Show. Smith is also the author of Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Zer0 Books, 2019) and coauthor with Mareile Pfannebecker of Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the end of Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2020). Smith is a defender of the idea that the 2016-2020 “Bernie moment” was a real opportunity to advance the cause of socialism. While it can be tempting today to look back and think that it was doomed from the start, Smith argues that the failure was largely self-inflicted. This means there are lessons that can be learned from the failure. However, he notes, the left today “seems worryingly uncurious about the regressive influence earlier defeated lefts have sometimes inadvertently had.”  Smith believes that the left needs to rethink its approach to political freedom. Following up on our recent episode with Efraim Carlebach on the 10-year anniversary of Mark Fisher’s famous essay, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” we chat with Smith about his recent Sublation essay, “Capitalist Realism All Over Again” (3.17.2023).  As he puts it, the left has “struggled to apply the book’s insights,” all too often succumbing to political correctness and “anti-political moralism.” Meanwhile, as evidenced in the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, capitalist elites are claiming that crises that are “too important to be hazarded to democratic oversight or protest.” When the left abandons this fight, the right will try to fill in the gap, claiming that only it can stop the power grab.  We also ask Smith about some of his recent episodes, including his interview with Matt Taibbi, one of the main journalists behind The Twitter Files. Like Taibbi, Smith believes that capitalist elites today are leveraging state powers to censor social media activity, essentially constituting a strategy of “revenge against both left and right populism.”  We also discuss a number of foreign policy matters, from the west’s war for NATO expansion in Ukraine to the iconoclastic left’s bankrupt analysis of Israel’s war in Gaza. Concerning the latter, many otherwise insightful critics have suggested that Hamas is essentially a bonapartist organization, seeking to create an islamic state. How does Smith respond to these critics? Moreover, given the difficulty of imagining the construction of a working class party in Gaza today, what should be the left position on this terrible war? Smith can be followed on Twitter/X @thepopularpod. Curious listeners can also follow up on Smith’s work on Jacobin, where he has published numerous articles on the state of the British left: “The Labour Party Is Ignoring Britain’s Muslims. A Judge-Led Inquiry Won’t Change That” (12.12.2023) “Labour’s Left Needs to Regain the Insurgent Spirit That Made Jeremy Corbyn Leader” (07.31.2023) “The Labour Left’s Fatal Contradictions Are Still Unresolved” (11.04.2021)

Welcome to Episode 12 ‘Transmissions,’ a Class Unity podcast. In this lighthearted episode we discuss the question of Leftoid Busywork. We open with an except from The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), an animated adaptation of the novel by the same name, by Norton Juster. In the clip, the young protagonist Milo meets a character named the Terrible Trivium. Milo is on a mission but he needs to make some allies along the way. The Trivium seems aware of this, and offers to help. But first, he needs hand with some tasks! “First, please help me move this pile of sand with tweezers…” Is this cartoon a metaphor for the left? Why do so many leftist organizations engage in wasted forms of activity? In this episode, your hosts Daniel B, Katie F, Steph K, and Nick K explore these questions, and share stories from their own organizing of “time wasted doing pointless leftoid busy work.”

Welcome to Episode 11 of Class Unity Transmissions! In this episode, we are joined by Efraim Carlebach to discuss the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Mark Fisher’s seminal essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle.  Published on November 24, 2013, Fisher’s essay is remembered today as a powerful shot across the bows of what was known at the time as the “call out” left. In particular, the essay was a response to a recent controversy stemming from the appearance of “working class” comedian Russell Brand on the BBC’s Newsnight program. Feminists expressed outraged at the BBC’s choice to interview Brand at all, noting the sexually insensitive nature of his content. Fisher repudiated these critics as “PoshLeft moralizers” and witch-hunting scolds, leveraging Brand’s apparent deafness to the linguistic norms of the middle-class gender lexicon in exchange for online clout. In their insistence that Brand’s white male privilege made him one of the oppressors, they had blinded themselves to the foundational role of working-class culture in revolutionary politics.  Fisher’s defense of the working-class culture notwithstanding, his position on the priority of working-class politics was more ambiguous. In this discussion, we start by trying to situate Fisher as a left anti-capitalist. After his suicide in 2017, Fisher’s work on “capitalist realism” became something of a totem for the millennial left. However, as Carlebach argues, Fisher was never fully clear on what he meant by the term. On the one hand, he often referred to the idea — frequently attributed to Fredric Jameson — that we are so profoundly mentally stuck in within capitalist ideology that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” On the other, he would sometimes make the interesting move of saying that capitalist realism was specifically “a pathology of the left.”  Ultimately, the ambiguity was short-lived. Where Fisher has once posted approvingly of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalization, a pointed criticism of the counter-cultural left, the defeat of Jermey’s Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party would see this theme would soon drop out of his work. The culturalist nature of Fisher’s defense of the working class folded easily enough into Fisher’s late-life return to the New Left, the politics of “consciousness raising,” and the idea of what he called “acid communism.” Here he embraced the idea that capitalism is essentially a problem caused by “modernity.” Capitalism as an economic system was a problem primarily insofar as it worked towards the subsumption of belief systems, cultures and “lifeworlds.” In this respect, the influence on Fisher’s work of British New Left thinkers such as Stuart hall and Raymond Williams is evident. The political question, for Fisher, concerned the repudiation and overcoming of bourgeois epistemology. As such, his work stands as a paragon example of why it is not enough to be merely an anti-capitalist.  For Carlebach, the goal of Marxism is not so much to tear down of bourgeois society but to transcend it, and to liberate it from the contractions of capitalism, the very mode of political economy that it itself created. Marx, seeing capitalism as the harbinger of our liberation as a species, eschewed the purely negative critique of capitalism as reactionary. The point of Marxist politics therefore is not to destroy the bourgeois revolution but to liberate it from capitalism, and make its fruits and rights available to all.  This episode was recorded on Friday, September 29, 2023. If you like this episode, kindly leave us a positive review on your podcast app! Your hosts for this episode are: Nicholas Kiersey: @occupyirtheory C. Derick Varn: @skepoet Noah LC Relevant links: Carlebach’s article, “Forgetting Mark Fisher,” in Platypus Review 115 (April 2019), https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/forgetting-mark-fisher/ Carlebach’s discussion about Fisher with the Association for the Design of History (January 17, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/live/Y-aOATKC4J0?si=idJ4NqGYfX-iSNQr   PRODUCTION NOTE: Due to a production error, the original version of this posted episode contained an “empty air” moment around the 14:30 mark. A corrected version of the episode was posted on January 9, 2024.

If Marxism is a theory of history grounded in economics, how should Americans understand our own history from a Marxist perspective? What can the critique of political economy tell us about the major events of American life from the Revolution to the World Wars to today? What are the class dynamics animating the most crucial event of American military history, the Civil War? In preparation for our Fall 2023 Capital Reading Group, members of CU’s PoliEd Committee got together for a one-day discussion of Karl Marx’s writings on the American Civil War. Join them in this episode of PoliEdPod, as they discuss two brief articles written early in the War in 1861: ‘The North American Civil War’ and ‘The Civil War in the United States.’ They also discuss some of Marx’s statements on the political-economic function of racism. Both essays are available HERE.

In this episode, Jamal and Mehmed discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict, focusing on the left's perspective of Zionism. They delve into the objective material conditions in Gaza, the plight of the Palestinian population, and the brutal response of the Israeli state. They also analyze US and Israeli foreign policy, the influence of the Israel lobby, the shifting dynamics in the Middle East, and the potential for labor organizing. Overall, they explore the need for a class-first approach to the conflict.