In this episode, we are joined by Michael Thomas to talk about Black aesthetics and hip hop in particular. We work through what it means for hip hop to be a 'problem space' that reconstructs the cultural contradictions and political messaging of a racist society in a way that is not essentializing and that aspires to address social problems without producing easy answers. Main themes include hip hop's form, vibe, and story-telling capacity across generations. leftofphilosophy.com |...

In this patrons-only episode we discuss Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 The State and Revolution. When he’s not snarkily dragging his political opponents for their opportunism and philistinism, Lenin tries to work through some of the most hotly contested ideas in Marxian political theory, including the role of the state in capitalist society and its ‘withering away’ after the revolution, the problems of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bureaucracy, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. How could...

In this inaugural episode of our new series on aesthetics, we discuss Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. We begin with his assessment of the French Revolution and its perceived failure to deliver on its lofty republican ideals, focusing on his ascription of this failure to the fragmentation of the modern self and society. We then attempt to wrap our minds around Schiller’s proposed corrective: an ‘aesthetic education’ that mobilizes art and beauty toward the...

In this episode, we take a deep dive into Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks. We discuss his views on racism as a form of alienation and narcissism, assess that status of reason throughout his argument, and interrogate his emphasis on futurity over history. Throughout we defend his theory of social pathology and his embrace of reason and universal humanism. This episode should be a stimulating introduction to the anticolonial and revolutionary work of Fanon for both newcomers...

In this episode we are joined by Devin Zane Shaw to talk about his book Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy. We discuss the concept of the ‘three-way fight’, what Beauvoir’s analysis of the antinomies of action can teach us about emancipatory violence, and the necessity of community self-defense. Ambiguity may be an inescapable condition for those of us who truly care about freedom, but you just cannot have dinner with nazis, comrades. leftofphilosophy.com...

Feeling alienated? In this episode, we are here for you. We dig into three periods of Herbert Marcuse’s thought. Marcuse was Martin Heidegger’s student in the 1920s, a member of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s, and stays haunting the petit bourgeois in the 2020s. We pay our respects and get to the bottom of his influence on critical theory, social movements, and the culture. leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil References: Herbert Marcuse,...

In this episode we dig into some early writings by the incomparable black radical feminist and communist Angela Davis. We reflect on some of the contradictions involved in the transformation of women’s labor in the development of patriarchal capitalism and the latent potentials for the emancipated life in common that these developments nevertheless carry within themselves. We talk about the radical potential of industrializing housework, discuss strategies for the formation of effective...

We couldn't put together a new episode for you this week, so we thought we'd unlock an old Patreon exclusive! Thanks to everyone who helped us pick which one by voting in our Twitter poll. We'll be back with a brand new ep next Monday. -- In this episode, the crew takes on a beloved figure of the academic 'left': Michel Foucault. The discussion gravitates around Foucault’s work in the early 1970’s on the ‘punitive society’, power as civil war, and popular rebellion. This post-‘68 period of...

In the second installment of our “What is Liberalism?” series we discuss the relationship between liberalism and the institution of the police. If a core principle of liberalism is the equal application of the law, then some enforcement mechanism is necessary to ensure the stability of the social order. The problem is that in liberal democracies the police are asked to equally apply the law while maintaining an unequal social order. These two tasks create legitimacy crises for the state.  We...

In this special holiday episode we bring in the new year by being complete and total haters! We keep it real light and breezy for this short little convo. We drag Auld Lang Syne, the concept of New Years’ resolutions, the very notion of historical dates, and also for some reason the city of Boston. At one point the discussion turns into an unboxing video, which is great content for a podcast, famously a visual medium. Oh and we read Antonio Gramsci’s 1916 essay “I Hate New Year’s Day”. We’re...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was many things, but chill was not one of them. In this patron-exclusive episode we have no chill either, getting into it about the renegade philosopher’s Discourse on Inequality, his totally bizarre fictional state of nature, and his stunningly prescient critique of modern society. You know, we aren’t primitivists at all, but sometimes it’s kinda hard to maintain that this whole civilization thing was worth it. We gave dogs anxiety disorders and spend our spare time...

In this episode we talk with Jacob Blumenfeld about the concept of property in German Idealism. As it turns out, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each had a pretty different idea of property than their Anglo counterparts who were out there apologizing for private property as a natural right and capitalism as freedom. Some might even say that socialism is what completes the system of German Idealism. They might also say that Fichte is totally bonkers. In either case, the Germans are both way cooler and...

Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism is probably the most important foundational text for modern sociology, and we think that’s kind of a downer, actually. We talk about how we are thoroughly unconvinced about his central historical claim in the book, which seems to be that the Protestant reformation created the subjective conditions for the emergence of capitalism somehow. We also take him to task for his weak criticism of historical materialism and for his own sorely...

This is a tribute episode to the great Mike Davis, the visionary social theorist and comrade who recently passed away in October 2022. We discuss his pathbreaking social analysis of Los Angeles, his political economy of urban life, his fondness for and reactivation of Marx’s political writings, and his unique ability to locate concrete phenomena within a specific historical conjuncture. Despite his clairvoyance about our disastrous present trajectory, we show why he was not the ‘prophet of...

In Part Two of our two-part mini-series we discuss the work of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. We ask what difference there is between the thought of Bloch and Theodor Adorno, how hope and utopia enable political action, and why so many traditions seem to abhor the concept of utopia. Expand your horizons and come learn how to hope again in this episode! This is just a small clip from the full episode, which is available to patrons: patreon.com/leftofphilosophy References: Ernst...

In part one of our two-part mini-series on hermeneutics and utopia we discuss the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer in his 1983 text Praise of Theory. We talk about the importance of prejudice and tradition for self-understanding, ask whether the natural sciences or the human sciences have sole claim to truth, and praise the (qualified) freedom of theory from instrumental reason (continental philosophy even gets a positive shout-out!). The purpose of this mini-series is to assess the insights of...

In this episode we are joined by Martin Hägglund to discuss the existentialist's argument for what makes human life meaningful—and why democratic socialism is the logical conclusion to reach after having considered the matter carefully. We also dig into the limits of social democracy, the need for the state, and the revaluation of value that is yet to come. leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil Follow Martin: @martinhaegglund | http://martinhagglund.se References: Martin Hägglund, This Life:...

In this episode we are joined by James Callahan (aka Crane) to talk about Gillian Rose’s book Hegel Contra Sociology. We explore Rose’s critique of early twentieth-century sociology, which she argues was completely hampered by the limitations of its neo-Kantian framework. Looking to break out of this transcendental circle, Rose turns to Hegel and defends a highly original and sophisticated reading of his speculative political thinking, in order to develop a sociological analysis adequate for...

In today’s episode we talk about Guy Debord’s critique of life under modern capitalism by looking at his scathing and provocative The Society of the Spectacle. Is it true that all that was once lived is now mere representation? That the whole of society is mediated by an endless proliferation of passifying images? That the fullness of life has been replaced by its bloodless negation in survival? Because it sure feels like it! We discuss what exactly he means by spectacle, reflect on whether...

In this patron-exclusive episode, we continue our series on the concept of dialectics by talking about Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. We reflect on what a non-closed dialectical system would look like, why Adorno is definitely not the defeatist he’s often caricatured as being, and what it means for us to hold onto utopian promises for a better world from within the administered nightmare of modern capitalism. Along the way we try to hone in on what’s special about Adorno’s negative dialectics,...

In this episode we are joined by Nathan DuFord to discuss their new book Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory. We unpack why they believe solidarity ought to be theorized as a political concept rather than moral injunction. For DuFord, we risk missing that solidarity is what the oppressed do with one another and that the oppressed will have disagreements within their solidary groups if we undertheorize the political dimensions of solidarity. We go on to discuss the relationships...

In this episode we talk about the most important Marxist thinker during the time of the Second International, Karl Kautsky. We talk about his infamous claim that the breakdown of capitalism is historically inevitable, what he thinks socialist praxis should look like in a liberal democracy, and what the concentration of large-scale capital means for your small business. Plus at some point we realize that almost all anti-socialist arguments are actually just confused anti-capitalist ones, which...

In this episode we talk with the wonderful Jason Read about his work on the concept of transindividuality and what it means for critical social theory, Marxist notions like alienation and reification, and traditional conceptions of freedom and equality. It’s bad news for anyone who thinks politics can be directly derived from ontology, but incredibly productive theoretically and practically if you're willing to think social relations as processes. Also Will admits he’s almost ready to confess...

In this episode we talk psychoanalytic theory and practice. With Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as our touchstone, we get speculative about human desire, the death drive, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and political struggle. We discuss the problem of scaling up from individual psychology to collective organizations, the opacity of the subject, and some of the psychosocial pathologies peculiar to the United States here in the twenty-first century. We could all use a bit...

In this episode we discuss James Boggs’s 1963 The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. We talk about Boggs’s materialist conception of rights as “what you make and what you take.” In Boggs we find a novel conception of rights that are grounded in social power. We delve into the dangers automation and structural unemployment present to rights to life and happiness while wondering if a “workless” society would truly be a better one. In the end, we extend a figleaf to...