I have invited Chris Cutrone onto the show for a critical debate and discussion on our differences regarding Marxism in America, imperialism, interpretations of Nietzsche and the meaning of the left. Chris Cutrone is not someone that I agree with in matters of Marxism, but we have talked past each other for several years now and we have decided to talk out our differences directly, without a third party mediator.
One of my objectives in this discussion is to model the type of public debate that I think we need more of on the left. While Chris Cutrone is not someone that I agree with on hardly anything, his presence on the Marxist left is inescapable and it is important that we have the chance to confront our differences in the open air of the public, without control or censor.
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
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1:52:13
Jacques Rancière Interview on Emancipations
Please welcome Jacques Rancière to the Emancipations podcast. In the unlikely event you are not aware of the work of Jacques Rancière, he is seemingly impossible to classify as a thinker. He emerges from the May 68 moment, a student of Althusser who broke from his teacher and went on to develop some of the most uniquely inspiring works on emancipatory politics, aesthetics and most interestingly, he wrote a series of works on proletarian intellectuals in the 19th century.
I ask Jacques Rancière whether the seeming decline in ‘master philosophers’ from the time of French Theory is a good thing, and what a master philosopher is for him. I ask him what he thinks of the working-class today and its fragmented status. I ask him how we should assess the defeat of left-populism and what he thinks of Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri and other post-Marxist theorists of “radical democracy.”
I ask him if he thinks our time resembles the pre-1848 period wherein class antagonisms were rampant but the working-class was unorganized. Read this interview on my Substack (https://danieltutt.substack.com).
Please support my efforts to bring you these discussions by becoming a Patron on Patreon. As a Patron you will receive early access to all of my interviews and public seminars (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups).
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1:23:01
Marx and the Struggle for Freedom (feat. Vanessa Wills & Daniel Tutt)
We are joined by Marxist philosophers Vanessa Wills and Daniel Tutt for a discussion moderated by Sam Greenhouse. This in-person podcast event delves into the philosophy of Marx and how Marx's thought relates to the ongoing quest for freedom in today’s world. We discuss Marx's Ethical Vision, Vanessa's important new book on Marx.
Please join us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups) to support our efforts.
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1:56:13
Marx and the Problem of Inequality (feat. Branko Milanović)
We welcome Branko Milanović for a discussion on inequality and Marxism and his latest book Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality, told through portraits of six key figures.
Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at Johns Hopkins University (1997- 2007). He was a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford, and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (2010-11). His book The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. Global Inequality (2016) was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and the Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into 16 languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. His most recent books are Capitalism, Alone, published in 2019, and Visions of Inequality, published in 2023
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1:30:30
The Origins of the Revolutionary Tradition in America (feat. Gerald Horne)
We are joined by Dr. Gerald Horne for a discussion on the meaning of the American Revolution and his extensive scholarship on re-assessing 1776 as a "counterrevoluton." At the heart of this discussion is the political and practical question for socialist politics in our time, namely: what is salvageable from 1776, and what is not? How do we read history from a materialist point of view?
Dr. Horne's scholarship traces the social forces that brought about the rebellion of 1776 back farther than most historians of the American Revolution have done, by showing how the international forces went to shape the early settlers in relationship to the threat of slave rebellions and resistance. Horne's work also sheds light on a far more extensive network of resistance and rebellion amongst enslaved Africans that has largely gone ignored by historians and he reveals how central the slavery question was to the wider movements of 1776.
Chapters
Opening and Intro to Dr. Horne
Is the American revolution a purely bourgeois revolution?
Can we salvage the optimism of 1776?
Is there a revolutionary tradition in America?
Understanding slave rebellions and resistance pre-1776
How can history help the "class vs. race" debate that often divides the left?
How is "counterrevolution" related to Trump? Is Trump Bonapartist or Fascist?
How can socialists contest the two capitalist parties in America?
Closing and future of Dr. Horne's scholarship and work
Please join our Patreon to support us and get early access to all of our interviews, seminars and videos (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups).
Dr. Gerald Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne is the author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His current research includes two forthcoming books: The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery, Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism and Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918-1968. His other projects include a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period. He won the American Book Award for The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century in 2021.
Brasil