What's Left of Philosophy

In this episode we are joined by Devin Zane Shaw to talk about his book Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy. We discuss the concept of the ‘three-way fight’, what Beauvoir’s analysis of the antinomies of action can teach us about emancipatory violence, and the necessity of community self-defense. Ambiguity may be an inescapable condition for those of us who truly care about freedom, but you just cannot have dinner with nazis, comrades.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2020)Devin Zane Shaw, “Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight”, at threewayfight: https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2021/08/seven-theses-on-three-way-fight.htmlGlen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (New York: Routledge, 2021)Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021)Shane Burley, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Feeling alienated? In this episode, we are here for you. We dig into three periods of Herbert Marcuse’s thought. Marcuse was Martin Heidegger’s student in the 1920s, a member of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s, and stays haunting the petit bourgeois in the 2020s. We pay our respects and get to the bottom of his influence on critical theory, social movements, and the culture. leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode we dig into some early writings by the incomparable black radical feminist and communist Angela Davis. We reflect on some of the contradictions involved in the transformation of women’s labor in the development of patriarchal capitalism and the latent potentials for the emancipated life in common that these developments nevertheless carry within themselves. We talk about the radical potential of industrializing housework, discuss strategies for the formation of effective solidarity, and—as usual—find a way to drag American suburbia. Get out there and contest capitalist power at the point of production! Those potentialities won’t actualize themselves, after all.This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:patreon.com/leftofphilosophyReferences:Angela Y. Davis, "Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation," in The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden: Blackwell, 2000)Angela Y. Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”, in Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1983)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

We couldn't put together a new episode for you this week, so we thought we'd unlock an old Patreon exclusive! Thanks to everyone who helped us pick which one by voting in our Twitter poll. We'll be back with a brand new ep next Monday.--In this episode, the crew takes on a beloved figure of the academic 'left': Michel Foucault. The discussion gravitates around Foucault’s work in the early 1970’s on the ‘punitive society’, power as civil war, and popular rebellion. This post-‘68 period of his life and work is often seen as his most politically radical, both because of his activist involvement in the Prisons Information Group (GIP) and because he directly engages with Marxist discourse and thought. Nevertheless, the conversation quickly turns skeptical (to put it mildly). We question both the explanatory power and the political stakes of his historical studies: What is the principle of connection between the often remote historical discourses and events he examines and present conditions of life? What are the consequences of rejecting causal explanations of historical development? Above all, how salient and clarifying are his histories for emancipatory struggles in the present? We try to answer these questions, while poking a bit of fun at our Foucauldian friends and comrades. Oh and we talk about the CIA’s alleged awareness of the increasing hegemony of French theory in the academic left—apparently they loved that for us.leftofphilosophy.com Follow us @leftofphilReferences:Michel Foucault, Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971-1972, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt et. al., trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador)Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan)Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In the second installment of our “What is Liberalism?” series we discuss the relationship between liberalism and the institution of the police. If a core principle of liberalism is the equal application of the law, then some enforcement mechanism is necessary to ensure the stability of the social order. The problem is that in liberal democracies the police are asked to equally apply the law while maintaining an unequal social order. These two tasks create legitimacy crises for the state.  We discuss how the liberal political economy of the United States explains the exceptional brutality of the police, why it is so difficult to think of a world beyond the police, and how redistribution would ameliorate crime and social disorder.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Matias Dewey, Cornelia Woll, and Lucas Ronconi, “The Political Economy of Law Enforcement,” Maxpo Discussion Discussion no. 20/1 (2021): 1-28.Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America,” American Journal of Law and Equality 2 (2022): 85-106.David Garland, “Penal Controls and Social Controls: Toward a Theory of American Penal Exceptionalism,” Punishment & Society 22(3) (2021): 321-352.Geoffrey H. Hodgson, “What are Institutions?” Journal of Economic Issues 40(1) (2006): 1-25.Music:Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this special holiday episode we bring in the new year by being complete and total haters! We keep it real light and breezy for this short little convo. We drag Auld Lang Syne, the concept of New Years’ resolutions, the very notion of historical dates, and also for some reason the city of Boston. At one point the discussion turns into an unboxing video, which is great content for a podcast, famously a visual medium. Oh and we read Antonio Gramsci’s 1916 essay “I Hate New Year’s Day”. We’re just having some fun with it! Happy new year to you all!(Sorry about the spotty audio quality—we all called in to record from our various holiday locales and didn’t have our best hardware on us!)leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Antonio Gramsci, “I Hate New Year’s Day”, trans. Alberto Toscano, Viewpoint Magazine | https://viewpointmag.com/2015/01/01/i-hate-new-years-day/Music:Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.comAuld Lang Syne by Guy Lombardo (1947) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SID1FS7RclgAuld Lang Syne - Bad Recorder Cover by Brizzy Brit | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcrIvOmoxRc

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was many things, but chill was not one of them. In this patron-exclusive episode we have no chill either, getting into it about the renegade philosopher’s Discourse on Inequality, his totally bizarre fictional state of nature, and his stunningly prescient critique of modern society. You know, we aren’t primitivists at all, but sometimes it’s kinda hard to maintain that this whole civilization thing was worth it. We gave dogs anxiety disorders and spend our spare time licking the boots of our economic and political overlords! It sure seems like mistakes were made! Come, friends: take the Rousseau pill with us.This is just a short  clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:patreon.com/leftofphilosophy References:Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 3, ed. Roger D. Masters and Chistopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (Hanover: Dartmouth University Press, 1992).Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

In this episode we talk with Jacob Blumenfeld about the concept of property in German Idealism. As it turns out, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each had a pretty different idea of property than their Anglo counterparts who were out there apologizing for private property as a natural right and capitalism as freedom. Some might even say that socialism is what completes the system of German Idealism. They might also say that Fichte is totally bonkers. In either case, the Germans are both way cooler and way weirder than you know.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Jacob Blumenfeld, The Property Relation: Freedom, Right, and Recognition in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel (forthcoming)Jacob's Academia page: https://uni-oldenburg.academia.edu/JacobBlumenfeldMusic: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism is probably the most important foundational text for modern sociology, and we think that’s kind of a downer, actually. We talk about how we are thoroughly unconvinced about his central historical claim in the book, which seems to be that the Protestant reformation created the subjective conditions for the emergence of capitalism somehow. We also take him to task for his weak criticism of historical materialism and for his own sorely lacking methodology. The book’s definitely got some interesting stuff in it, but it’s mostly a swing and a miss for us! Sorry, Weberians!leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil References:Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002).Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

This is a tribute episode to the great Mike Davis, the visionary social theorist and comrade who recently passed away in October 2022. We discuss his pathbreaking social analysis of Los Angeles, his political economy of urban life, his fondness for and reactivation of Marx’s political writings, and his unique ability to locate concrete phenomena within a specific historical conjuncture. Despite his clairvoyance about our disastrous present trajectory, we show why he was not the ‘prophet of doom’ that some think he was, insisting on the renewal of his spirit of militancy and hope.RIP to a true giant of the Left and a fierce, loving comrade.leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphilReferences:Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006).Mike Davis, “Marx’s Lost Theory: The Politics of Nationalism in 1848”, New Left Review 93 (May/June 2015).Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com