The Regrettable Century

Head over to Patreon and sign up for $2 a month to hear the second part of the discussion. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show Visit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop

The British left was epically owned last month in one of the crappiest election results in several generations. While the reaction to this defeat has been largely one of despair and feelings of rudderlessness, we make the case that this is just one in a long line of defeats we will inevitably suffer. Unless we gird ourselves for defeat with a dialectical pessimism, there's no way we will last long...

Wherein we continue our discussion with Derick. Head on over tour our Patreon and sign up for $2 a month to check it out. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show Visit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop

The boys--all the good ones--sat down with C. Derick Varn of Pop the Left and the Symptomatic Redness (which can be found on the Zero Books podcast feed) to talk about Socialism in One Country and/or Socialist Internationalism. We tackled the topic that has plagued the workers' movement from the early days of the Socialist International and wrapped it up quite nicely. We have answered the national...

Apparently, fully automated luxury communism is more than just a meme. We read some articles about it and decided to have a discussion about its merits and shortfalls. Is a post labor society something that is possible or desirable? Is technology really shifting the base of society in a direction that makes fully automated luxury communism more likely? How do we define the concept of luxury and is...

Sometimes doing something is much worse than doing nothing;  we need to figure out when that is. We read and thought and talked about an article that admonishes us to think and talk and read before acting. We have to stand against a politics of catharsis, a politics that does nothing but makes us feel like we are making a difference. Check out the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/t...

Marxism had always contained within it a multiplicity of variations and is possessed, in equal parts, the potential to be used for illumination and obfuscation. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the early responses of Marxists to fascism. In our second installment of our series on the history of fascism, we dive into some Marxist theories of fascism. Our primary source of info for this ep...

It is the first birthday of the Regrettable Century! We spent the better part of an hour reflecting on our proud moments, regrets, things we changed our minds about (or didn't), and where we would like to go in the future. We've got some heavy material coming up, so enjoy this comparatively light fare. Music: Every Day is Halloween- Ministry Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Supp...

The movement for proletarian self emancipation is at a low ebb, but in a testament to how stupid and bad the world is, Democrats, Republicans, and European post-fascists have ramped up their rhetorical attacks on the pale ghost of the specter of communism. Anti-communism has always been the stand-in ideology for racist authoritarianism and it serves the same purpose now in a world without a global...

Steven from The Supreme Leap Forward is back to talk about the KKKriminal INjustice CIStem of the United $nakes of AmeriKKKa. We discuss the courts, restorative justice, twitter pileons/call out culture, and a little about Soviet jurisprudence. Steven's essay mentioned in the episode: Understanding Crime Under Capitalism: A Critique of American Criminal Justice and Introduction to Marxist Jurispru...

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations, both in the realm of cultural  and -- apparently -- technological production. Culture has crawled to a halt, its progress replaced by advances in methods of distribution. Technology is bogged down in a cycle of adding additional cameras to the iphone. Has capitalism outlived its progressive potential? (The TLD...

Check out some Real Nerd Hours when Chris and Jason have a discussion about a not very well known article from an obscure Trotskyist journal written around a decade ago... It generated a little bit of a buzz, but was mostly ignored. We think that was a mistake and we are going to tell you all about why you should care about the decisions of the 10th party congress. https://www.patreon.com/posts/re...

"Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so o...

This week we dive in to the second part of our two part collaboration with Adam from Red Library , who hosts s a great podcast that analyzes and discusses important works of Marxist theory and history. We are big fans, go check them out. This week we continued our discussion on Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism by Russell Jacoby, so if you haven't listened to the first part, do that...

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...

We decided that a good companion to our episode about Melancholia and Organized Pessimism would be a rare recording with all of us (except Kevin) in the same room, talking about a pretty cool movie that we saw over a decade ago. Sign up on our, very reasonably priced, Patreon to access our-- small but ever growing number of-- bonus episodes. https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury Send us a...

When we were kids: history ended, the Christian right launched an all out assault on the gains of the 1960s/70s, the liberals launched an all out assault on the gains of the New Deal/labor movement, and the left launched an all out assault on each others shopping choices. It sucked.  The world was recreated in the dumbest and worst possible ways and we are going to let you listen to us talk about...

We received a really thoughtful and challenging question/comment from one of our Patrons and we decided to give it the attention it deserves, in the form of a full episode.  We discuss "pessimism of the intellect/optimism of the will," mourning, melancholy, the church-like euphoria of the mass meeting, and how much it is necessary to bum people out.  If you have a question or concern you'd like us...

We read a bunch of stuff about Walter Benjamin and Enzo Traverso and tried to have a conversation about it.  We've only managed to reinforce the idea that "The organization of pessimism" is the only slogan that can save us from death.  Traverso, Enzo. Left-wing melancholia : Marxism, history, and memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Print. Against Revolutionary Pessimism and Optimism...

We sat down with C. Derick Varn and solved all the problems that are currently ailing the left. We reconciled the divergent currents of Marxism and wove together the materialist and idealist dichotomy with resounding success, but then lost an hour and a half of audio and were forced to restart the recording; what resulted was a meandering, but entertaining, discussion about just about everything.....

After our Socialism From Below episode, Jason and Chris thought they could have used more time to talk about the 4th Comintern congress and the question of "Workers' Governments." What resulted is an impromptu discussion that we posted on our Patreon.  Head on over and sign up for $2.  Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show Visit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop

From Babeuf and Blanqui to Bakunin; from Karl Marx and Kautsky to Kropotkin, an ideological battle rages over the true nature of socialism!  But why though? This week we discuss whether or not there really are only "Two Souls of Socialism" and if idea of "socialism from below" is a useful analytical framework around which to organize our politics. Hal Draper’s “Two Souls of Socialism” https://www....

This is part one of a series in which we will chart the history of fascism and attempt to dissect and discuss it in greater detail than we have previously been able to. Our goal is to analyze some of the scholarship done by mainstream and Marxist scholars alike, in order to better understand the phenomenon. In Part one we synthesize a list of the ideological characteristics of Classical Fascism fr...

The Gang Gets Underwhelmed by Zizek v. Peterson.  It wasn't the "Debate of the Century" we wanted, but it's the one that we deserved.   Music: Kerber- Ratne Igre Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show Visit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop

We are currently witnessing what appears to be the death of the micro sect form of political organization, a bastard form of the Leninist party that has all but dominated the minuscule and embattled American radical left for the past half century. The political landscape has changed in a way that has rendered these groups obsolete, removing the sectarian left's monopoly on socialist politics in th...