Emancipations Podcast

Was Atlantic slavery a capitalist system or a pre-capitalist system? If we understand Atlantic slavery (16th - 19th centuries) as a distinct capitalist system of domination, what does this tell us about capitalism as such, and what does it tell us bout how slavery was overthrown and eventually abolished? My guest, David McNally has written a provocative and important new book entitled Slavery and Capitalism that argues enslaved people formed a modern working class whose resistance was a form of labor struggle.

We discuss the concepts of slavery as imposing a form of "social death," and how McNally understands enslaved workers as a category of labor power responsible for generating surplus value. We also revisit the legacy of Eugene Genovese, the prominent neo-Gramscian historian and the debates he raised over rebellion and cultural resistance among the enslaved in the Antebellum South. We address the importance of the historical field known as "history from below" to understand slave rebellions and the wider historical period of slavery as well as the work of WEB Du Bois and CLR James and what they contribute to our wider understanding of the history of slavery. The main thematic areas we address in this discussion include:

The new history of capitalism and its blind spot in terms of the history of slavery.

Slavery and capitalist value as Marx understood value and the wider categories in Marx's Capital.

Personhood vs. labor power--the concept of "social death" and how to understand subaltern agency.

Slave revolts, resistance and the shortcomings of Eugene Genovese's theory of paternalism, developed in his landmark book Roll, Jordan, Roll.

The concept of the "chattel proletariat" and what it implies in terms of Marxist categories of labor.

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David McNally is an activist and the NEH Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston. He was a professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario from 1983 to 2018, and was chair of the university's Department of Political Science for several years. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles and the winner of the 2012 Deutscher Memorial Award and the 2012 Paul Sweezy Award. -

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#juneteenth #emancipationspodcast

I'm joined by Marxist philosopher Kaveh Boveiri to discuss the concept of totality in Hegel and Marx. The center of our conversation is Dr. Boveiri's new book Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters. We also address the war on Iran and how the Iranian left is responding to US and Israel imperialism.

We begin by addressing the misconceptions of totality in atomistic rationalism and organicist conceptions before moving to a discussion on Hegel's concept of totality from the Science of Logic, Lukács's idea of totality in History and Class Consciousness, and we introduce the thought of Karel Kosík and his concept of concrete totality. We also discuss how Marx and Engels theorize totality from The German Ideology, Capital to the Grundrisse.

To learn more about getting a copy of Marxian Totality, please visit https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2685-marxian-totality 

Kaveh Boveiri is an instructor and researcher in the Sociology department at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), where he previously earned his PhD in philosophy. He is also a researcher for the UNESCO Chair in the Philosophical Foundations of Justice and Democratic Society at UQAM. 

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To learn more about supporting my work, please become a paid Patreon member at https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations

I am joined by Andrew Flores, a Lacanian psychoanalyst in formation and host of The Parallax Viewer to discuss the psychoanalytic concept of the drive. In this wide-ranging discussion, we introduce the four key elements that make up the drive, we discuss its pre-history before Freud, and we elaborate on its importance in psychoanalytic thought more generally.

SUGGESTED READINGS:

Works by Freud

Three Essays on Sexuality, Ch. 2 on "infantile sexuality"

Instincts and their Vicissitudes

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Works by Lacan:

Seminar II chapters 3 and 4 Seminar IV chapters 2, 3, and 7 Seminar VII: chapter 7,8, and 9 Seminar XI section on the Drive and Partial drives Seminar XVI:  chapter 14, see "The Two Sides of Sublimation"

Other Work Mentioned:

Fred Moten, "Aunt Hester's Scream"

Philip Rieff, Freud, The Mind of the Moralist

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Thank you for your continued support of our work which allows me to bring you these discussions on seminal works in the history of Marxist thought and philosophy. If you find my work valuable, please become a Patron to gain early access to all of my interviews and videos and discounts on my public courses: https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations

Alexandre Kojève's influence on intellectual life has been massive. His ideas have shaped major 20th century thinkers from Leo Strauss, Jacques Lacan to Georges Bataille. Today, most of us are familiar with Kojève's thought through his widely commented upon lectures delivered in Paris, 1933 - 1937 and subsequently published as the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is the text that Francis Fukuyama re-interpreted in his infamous End of History and the Last Man essay and book. But Kojève seldom published his works and this has resulted in a partial and limited understanding of what Kojève really thought.

I am joined by philosopher Igor Shoikhedbrod for a discussion on a missing, albeit recently translated, text by Kojève entitled Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. This is Kojève's most sustained vision of the universal and homogenous state and in this text he addresses the question of legal right, justice and indeed, of his vision for the communist society. We discuss how Kojève defines the political in contradistinction to Carl Schmitt, what his theory of anthropogenic desire and recognition truly is, and we address Fukuyama’s misreading of Kojève. We also explore why Kojève defines communism as the era of individualism and how his legal thought differs from other Marxist philosophers.

In part two, we will dive deeper into Igor's essay, "Alternative Futures of Right in Pashukanis, Kojève, and Bloch" which is included in the book Kojève and Law: A Critical Examination, edited by Igor Shoikhedbrod.

Igor Shoikhedbrod is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2018, his M.A in Political Science from York University in 2011, and he also holds a B.A from the University of Toronto with a concentration in Ethics, Society, and Law. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation award in 2019 "for an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the American Political Science Association Meeting which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle for a better world." In 2021, Igor won the Domenico Losurdo International Prize for his essay, "From Hegel to Nietzsche: Domenico Losurdo's Complex Relationship with Liberalism." Prior to his appointment at St. Francis Xavier University, Igor taught courses in political theory, legal theory, ethics, law, and political economy at Dalhousie University, as well as at the University of Toronto, where he won two awards for teaching excellence. Igor is the author of Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (2019) with Palgrave Macmillan.

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Thank you for your continued support of our work which allows me to bring you these discussions on seminal works in the history of Marxist thought and philosophy. If you find my work valuable, please become a Patron to gain early access to all of my interviews and videos and discounts on my public courses: https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations

We begin a new three-part series on the history of materialism in Marxist thought by examining the 19th-century materialism controversy and the broader philosophical debates surrounding materialism at the moment Marx and Engels entered the intellectual scene. To set the social and political context to these debates, we focus on two important books on materialism from the mid to late 19th century: the neo-Kantian philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange's The History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance (1865) and the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov's The Development of the Monist View of History (1895).

In Lange's three volume encyclopedic study we find a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic, account of materialism in the history of philosophy from the ancient Greek atomists up to Kant and beyond. Plekhanov's study focuses more on the materialist roots of historical materialism and thus looks at how issues of society and history are construed by philosophers from the time of Descartes, the early French materialists up to the 'modern materialism' of Marx and Engels.

Readings:

Friedrich Albert Lange's The History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance (1865) - https://bit.ly/4wrAHKM

Georgi Plekhanov's The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) - https://bit.ly/4tYWszL

Stay tuned for episode two where we dig into Marx's dissertation on Greek atomism and how Marxists define and debate materialism up to the Second International. Episode three will look at the materialism debates in Lenin up to the modern period including recent movements in philosophy such as 'speculative realism.'

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This series was voted on by our supporters on Patreon after our first series on The Problems of Intellectuals (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE03jn2k3GYBf8pPIshZfM4wDYUTL8594&si=LgWBIRDyhFKL2Lk7)

Thank you for your continued support of our work which allows us to bring you these discussions on seminal works in the history of Marxist thought and philosophy.

If you find my work valuable, please become a Patron to gain early access to all of my interviews and videos and discounts on my public courses: https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations 

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