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From Trade-Union Consciousness to Socialist Consciousness with Chris Townsend

Three of our writers are joined by veteran union organizer Chris Townsend for a podcast discussion on 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.

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Che Guevara and the Economics of Socialist Transition

Christian, Donald, and Rudy sit down for a podcast discussion on 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.

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Capitalism in the Web of Life: A Discussion

Join us for the second installment in Cosmonaut’s critically acclaimed ecology podcast 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.

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Unmasking Social Construction with Djamil Lakhdar

Donald and Rudy are joined by Djamil Lakhdar to discuss Ian Hacking’s book The Social Construction of What?. Written during the “science wars”, Hacking intervenes in the debate between strict constructivism and strict realism. Hacking reframes the types of questions to be asked when interrogating the social origin of something, and clarifies the different approaches we can take when we interrogate the construction of a concept. We start off with natural and social sciences, and continue to the application of these questions to today’s world. Is physics socially constructed? What does it mean to say gender, race or even capitalism are socially constructed? Where can we go from that assertion? What does it mean to say Marxism has Eurocentric origins and how does that matter today? Does Marxism have a single method, and how do different tendencies relate to that method? We try to answer these and more questions on this episode of Cosmopod.

 

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Protests, Guerillas and Revolution in Iran with Yassamine Mather

Donald and Lydia interview Yassamine Mather, former Fedayeen (minority) guerrilla fighter, chair of the Hands off the People of Iran coalition and editor of Critique. The episode starts off with the history of the debates leading to the formation of the minority Fedayeen faction, and why they decide to break from the majority Fedayeen faction, take up arms and start a guerilla/focoist campaign against the Iranian Republic after the 1979 revolution. Yassamine also offers her account of why the left failed to take advantage of the 1979 situation, the problems with focoism and guerilla tactics, as well as her thoughts on the 2019 protests in Iran, and how the international left and Iranian exiles should relate to the Islamic Republic.

Yassamine’s writing can be found on the Weekly Worker website. We especially recommend her talk “Learn the lessons of the Fedayeen“, as well as her general archive.

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Spontaneous Philosophy in Science and Activism

The Cosmonaut crew sits down to discuss Althusser’s Lectures on Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. We historically situate the text and talk about Althusser’s conception of science and of philosophy, how they both relate to each other and what happens when one exploits the other and “common sense”, in the form of the dominant ideology, creeps in. This is followed by a discussion on actual examples of how philosophy and science interrelate, and what it means to defend a materialist line in philosophy. We discuss philosophical practice in politics and end by providing an extension of Althusser’s concept to include Spontaneous Philosophy of the Activist, or how “common sense” creeps in to activism, and we end up reproducing liberal concepts in our organizing.

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Prefiguration and (Cosmic) Utopia with A. M. Gittlitz

Remi and Rudy welcome A. M. Gittlitz, the author of I Want to Believe: J. Posadas, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism and producers of The Antifada podcast to discuss the role of utopias and prefiguration in historical and modern-day communist strategy. We cover topics from Russian Cosmism, the parallels between New World and Space Utopias, the relationship between the subjective and objective conditions for revolution, finding spaces where we can imagine a better world, and how to find hope in the end of the end of history. The episode ends with the opening of Cosmos: Carl Sagan’s hope for a brighter future.

Check out Andy’s article on the Space force here.

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Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary. Join Niko, Ian, Matthew, and Remi as they discuss the context of this work, and how it started a rediscovery of Marx’s ecological politics. They discuss how ecology informed Marx’s understanding of the world since his doctoral thesis, the relationship between Marx, Darwin, and Malthus and the concept of metabolic rift.

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Articulating and Organizing the Social Body with Asad Haider

Donald and Rudy welcome Asad Haider from Viewpoint Magazine to discuss the present political moment. Using Badiou’s “The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings” as a starting point, we discuss riots as a political expression in an intervallic period. We talk about the shape of the party should take to represent this political will, the racial context, overdetermination and spontaneity, and how history is being restarted.

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To Live and Die in Kerala

Rudy, Ahmed, and Remi join Sam Agarwal, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University in sociology, whose research on and fieldwork in Kerala provide insight into the Indian state’s handling of societal crisis like the 2018-9 floods and COVID-19. We discuss the left politics of the CPI(M) and its various rival parties, the Indian political climate, the feminist movement, the handling and mitigation of climate change, and what we can learn from a contemporary communist-governed state while dealing with its limitations.

Check out Sam’s work here: https://truthout.org/articles/this-state-in-india-shows-us-why-fighting-covid-19-requires-working-class-power/

Books recommended include: The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities by Achin Vanaik and The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left by Praful Bidwai.