The Regrettable Century
The old forms of the left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a dialectical pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
The Regrettable Century
Dialectic of Defeat: A Collaboration with Red Library, Part I
Red Library is a great podcast that analyzes and discusses important works of Marxist (and other leftist) literature, and we are big fans. So, we are happy to announce that this week we teamed up with them to read and talk about Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism by Russell Jacoby. The discussion ran long, so it has been broken into two parts. This is part one.
In Dialectic of Defeat, Jacoby examines the losers of the Marxist tradition and argues that there is something to be learned from them, even in their defeat. He exhorts us to read the heretics, doubt the orthodoxies, and truly understand all of the rich and varied currents of Marxism, even if they ultimately failed to create a successful revolution.
After all, all of our gods failed us in the end.
Either that, or we failed them.
Jacoby, Russell. Dialectic of defeat : contours of western Marxism. Cambridge, U.K. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
Music:
Modern Life Is War- Farmer's Holiday Association