Auxiliary Statements

This week Jack and Dan read some blooming Bookchin. An anarchist! And a shockingly prophetic one at that. The boys ask, is mankind a part of nature or does it stand apart from it? What constitutes an ecological system and in what ways are social systems analogous to ecological ones? What is going on in the syphilis addled brains of the British aristocracy? Also the lads are now firmly committed to...

That's right folks, your brave podcasters have officially made it to T W E N T Y episodes of this here show. And you know what that means: we're phoning it in for another clip show. What have the boys learned over the last ten episodes? Does any of it matter? Is Marxism a legitimate tool for understanding the current state of things? Was Tom Morello in an episode of Star Trek? We answer none of th...

I don't know dude...what if time had like.......a fourth dimension? Reading: Voice of the Fire (1995), by Alan Moore.

Drum roll please! Welcome back to the show, podcast favourite, returning champion, and all round class act, Ellen Meiksins Wood! The lads discuss Meiksins Wood’s defence of EP Thompson’s theories of class against his structuralist and analytic Marxist critics. Discussion ranges from the origins of capitalism, to processes of class formation, and the place of class in politics today. Also covered;...

Turns out there's more to this book than the first six pages. Who woulda thought? This week the lads take a stab at deciphering the two-fold nature of the labor inside all commodities....but not before some corrections from last week. Corrections, I hear you say? How is that possible? Well get used to it because our brave hosts tend to say more crazy stuff than the Mariners' front office. Ba-boom!...

Hark! In the distance. What's that noise? Them's the dulcet tones of the boys talkin' some more Milly Band. So buckle in, hunker down, tune in, drop out and buckle up for one H-E-double-hockey-sticks of an episode, because this week we're talking about the necessity of a working class party capable of overthrowing this garbage can of a world we currently inhabit. In a twist, during this episode Da...

Its revolution folks! Or is it? This week Jack and Dan take their first look at the German revolution of 1918/19; that most sorrowful of events in the history of the international workers movement where the world failed to turn and the revolutionary wave that began in Russia in 1917 was so abruptly halted. The boys discuss the revolutionaries’ failures, the duplicity of the Social Democrats, the w...

What’s this, a new series from the Auxiliary Statements boys! Jack and Dan attempt to conquer the commanding heights of political economy and dip their toe where the big fish swim. That’s right, Big Daddy Marx’s Capital is the topic of this hopefully irregularly regular new offering to your podcast feed. Will these new acolytes to Marxology flounder or will they fly? Only time will tell. Reading:...

What's that? The lads are a little late getting around to talking about this book? Everyone already talked about it on their podcasts two years ago? Well better late than never I always say. This week our beautiful brave boys Dan and Jack create a summoning circle of sorts in an attempt to revive the calculation debate. Spoiler alert: markets are bad, folks. Also on the docket, Dan defends the Bor...

The boys make a return to Allende’s Chile this week with the conclusion of their sketch of its all too brief flirtation with cybernetic planning. Jack and Dan look at what exactly it was that cybernetician Stafford Beer proposed as a model for real-time decentralised economic management in Chile. They explore the highs, the lows, and some lessons that can be drawn from Project Cybersyn. Reading, C...

Well look who stopped by! Today Dan and Jack are joined by Marxist Podfather Tom O'Brien from the From Alpha to Omega Podcast. Tom talks some sense into the boys and gives us all sorts of scalding hot takes about Trump, Biden and the crumbling empire that is the United States of America. They lads then talk a little Revolutionary Strategy, cybernetics and Aaron Bastani's wet, wet mouth. You can fi...

This week Jack and Dan try to get to grips with the hip new theory on the block; Cybernetics! Our story starts in 1970s Chile. The boys learn all about how an eccentric British cybernetician named Stafford Beer came to be in the employ of the Socialist administration of president Salvador Allende. What does this management consultant have to teach a bunch of democratic socialists and how might bus...

Recorded before the events in DC so you won't have to sit through any current event hot takes! That's the Auxiliary Statements promise, baby. What's it been, six episodes since we talked about our boy Ralph?? This week Dan and Jack climb back aboard the Mili-train to talk a little bit more about the state. Is there a difference between bourgeois republicanism and fascism? Yeah for sure. Are they b...

Today's the day folks! Jack and Dan make their best effort to explain why the podcast has the title it does; what is an auxiliary statement? The boys dive deep into some philosophy of science and do their upmost to stay vaguely afloat as they wrestle with the ultimate question, what is scientific investigation and how is it done (and more importantly, not done)? Theory is nothing without practice!...

Wow Auxiliary Statements in your feed on a TUESDAY?! For the first episode of our mid-week mini-episode series (known henceforth as Adjunct Statements), Jack takes a dive into the greatest book ever written...State and Rev-, uh, I mean The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. Why the hell is this in my commie podcast feed you ask? Not sure, but Jack does his best to explain what use this big ol' book coul...

Well would you look at that. Dan and Jack have made it to 10 episodes. We couldn't be more proud of our boys, could we folks? This week they take a look back at everything they've read so far in an attempt to draw parallels and maybe a conclusion or two. But after 10 lovely episodes, only one thing is for sure - Louis Althusser was and remains to this day, an anarchist icon. Happy holidays from th...

On this week's show Jack and Dan continue their expedition to America's testcase state in all things deplorable and dastardly; California! Come listen to how a motley band of hippies, armed with sci-fi novels and utopian dreams, came to define the dystopian reality of the nascent computer age. Our hosts learn how things went so disastrously wrong and are forced to consider just how attached they t...

God damn I miss Ronald Reagan. That's the mood as the lads take a look at the rise of The New Right - the political movement that decided to once and for all end the legacy of the New Deal and replace it with something much stupider. In this episode, Dan and Jack will examine all the freaks, opportunists, chuds, racists, homophobes, war-hawks, fundamentalists and worst of all CALIFORNIANS that bro...

This week Jack and Dan are led down the garden path into the wonderful world of IDEOLOGY. With Althusser as a guide the boys try to grapple with the pervasive nature of the old foe capitalism and continue to seek an answer to the vexing question, “Why no revolution?”. Never before has ignorance been used as such an effective tool of criticism. Reading: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by...

The boys just couldn't keep away...Dan and Jack are back with chapter III and chapter IV section I of that Marxist classic - Marxism and Politics. This week they talk some more about class consciousness and what the hell that has to do with ideology. And what the hell is ideology. And what the hell are we. And do we even exist. They also get heated about Rob Manfred and talk a bit of baseball baby...

This week it's revealed that fantasy may mean a little TOO much to Jack and Dan as they try very hard to have a conversation about its utopian potential as well as its tendency to promote the status quo. If nothing else, both of our co-hosts are proven to be nothing more than massive, irredeemable, disgusting, sticky nerds. Reading: Why Fantasy Matters Too Much (2009) by Jack Zipes, The Journal of...

Things aren't looking good for the peasants this week as Dan & Jack finish up Ellen Meiksins Wood's "The Origin of Capitalism" by taking an in depth look at that foggy little island on the edge of the world - Great Britain. Also in this week's episode, Dan is outed as a "crazy cat person." Reading: The Origin of Capitalism (1999) by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Part II: The Origin of Capitalism, Part III:...

Dan & Jack look back at feudalism, look now at capitalism, and maybe even....forward to socialism? The lads take a stab at defining capitalism and understanding how we got here in this barnburner of an episode. As a bonus, Jack gets the author's name wrong every time he tries to say it. We also got Corbyn suspended :( Reading: The Origin of Capitalism (1999) by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Introduction an...

Dan & Jack look back on the successful 2010s - a decade of nothing but unblemished prosperity for T H E L E F T. Special thanks to this week's guest, Ralph Miliband. Reading: Tribune, Summer 2020 issue. "We Didn't Go Far Enough, We Didn't Go Fast Enough," interview with Jeremy Corbyn by Ronan Burtenshaw and "The Rise And Fall Of Bernie Sanders," interview with Briahna Joy Gray by Connor Kilpatrick...

Dan & Jack read the first chapter of an introductory book on Marxism and talk about roughly half of it. Special thanks to this week's guest, Ralph Miliband. Reading: Marxism and Politics by Ralph Miliband (1977), Chapter II: Class and Class Conflict