Cosmopod

Parker and Alex join Emil Jacobs of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands to discuss the factional struggle and expulsion of the Communist Platform group. They discuss the party's bureaucratic centralism and opposition to open democratic struggle by the party's parliamentary fraction. Should communists bother to try to push for principled politics within the broader workers movement? Why or why not? Emil also asks for context on the struggle for socialism in the US and the Democratic Socialists of America as well as Marxist Center groups. Weekly Worker articles added for context and updates to the struggle within the Dutch SP: Bureaucratic Control Freakery Youth Section Will Win Communist Platform website ROOD fundraiser

Rudy is joined by Jonathan, Henry and Felipe from the Boston Independent Drivers Guild for a discussion on how gig drivers are  resisting and organizing against precarity in their jobs. We discuss  what a typical working day looks like and how drivers relate to their  jobs and what the workforce looks like and what challenges that entails  when organizing, such as multilingualism. Felipe discusses how Uber and Lyft workers can meet each other, how BIDG was started, its current organizing strategy and the long-term goals of the guild,  and what  their relationship to others unions is. The episode then pivots to the  context of Prop 22, how that battle was lost and how the guild is  planning for future fights. We end by discussing Uber's interface with venture capital and its common lie that the company is not profitable   As Felipe said, if you are a gig worker, or a ride-sharing driver, you  are not alone. There is probably a driver union somewhere near you, with  people getting organized to fight.  

Donald Parkinson takes issue with the calls for a “socially conservative leftism” that have increased in popularity since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the UK election. Matthew Strupp reads the article aloud.

In the second episode of our Soviet Science series, Donald, Djamil and Rudy sit down to contextualize an infamous episode of this story: The case of T. D. Lysenko and Lysenkoism. We discuss the origins of vernalization and Lysenkoism in peasant folk knowledge and Michurin's plant garden, how the state of Soviet scientifical structures and Soviet agriculture favoured his rise, how he took advantage of the Soviet purges to solidify his standing, how he managed to absolutely ban the research of genetics in 1948, and how this ban was negotiated by other scientists, his many downfalls and rehabilitations starting in the early 1950s all the way up to the removal of Khruschev, and the shadow Lysenkoism cast on Soviet agronomy and biology for decades both internally and in the West. We also contextualize Lysenko's agricultural and biological theories using modern knowledge about epigenetics. Sources/Further Reading: David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) Robert M. Young, Getting Started on Lysenkoism (1978) Levins & Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (1985) Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost (2016) Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The case of Lysenko (1977)

Cliff Connolly argues for a culture of sobriety within our organizations, drawing from the example of Austrian Socialism.  

Alex and Rudy welcome historian Cliff Conner for a discussion of his recent book The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump published by Haymarket Books. They discuss how this tragedy is a tragedy of capitalist science which is seen across the capitalist world, the role of science as an unchallengeable source of authority and how that is squared with the antiintelectualism needed to sustain a power structure, the influence of money in regulation and research, the precautionary principle and the risk-assessment principles for commercializing new products and the use of reductionism in research and how that is unseparable from the bourgeois mentality. The conversation then moves to the American university and the effect of the Bayh-Dole act, and the relationship between military spending and research, including the US’s economy addiction to “weaponized Keynsianism” and how American policy makers do not care about the failures of military technology as long as the money keeps flowing. They discuss the ideals of objectivity and neutrality, ‘value-free’ science as an ideological tool and how the social sciences can strive for objectivity. They end off talking about what changes and what things will stay the same with Biden, and and how non-capitalist economies have shown that other models of science are possible where innovation did not rely on profit as a motive.   ---- Details on the financial interests behind Operation Warp Speed, by Marjorie Cohn:  https://truthout.org/articles/trump-administration-is-paying-big-pharma-billions-in-rush-for-vaccine/   Science for the People can be found here: https://scienceforthepeople.org

This article's author, Richard Hunsinger, is currently being held without bail in an ICE detention facility and could use our support. Donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund help political prisoners like Richard, and can be made at https://atlsolidarity.org/ Letters can be sent to Richard by emailing writetodick@protonmail.com Donations to his commissary can be sent on Venmo to Kat-Richards-1 or cashapp to $KatRichards. Discourse related to the concept of emotional labor can highlight the way capitalism distorts our humanity or merely naturalize capitalism, argues Richard Hunsinger. Cliff Connolly reads the article aloud.

Join the Cosmonaut Ecocrew as they discuss Andreas Malm’s piercing 2016 text Fossil Capital and attempt to dispel the myriad of myths that have been erected around the energetic transition to coal. The fateful intertwining in mid-19th century British cotton districts of capital and fossil fuels is examined in the context of class struggle, the ascendancy of the steam engine, and alternative futures which were incompatible with the logic of capital. ----- Check the previous episodes of this series: Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy with Red Library Capitalism in the Web of Life: A Discussion Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

The podcast discusses the necessity of a workers' party in advancing an emancipatory politics, exploring the rejection of political parties in light of the 2020 uprising, the role of conscious planning in mass movements like Black Lives Matter, and the importance of studying past struggles to develop strategies for the present class war towards communism. It also emphasizes learning from historical traditions and building a workers' party as a means to challenge dominant ideologies and push for real alternatives.

Rudy and Annie join the two co-chairs of Philly Socialists, Mara and Janaya, for what starts as a conversation on the issues women and non-men comrades face when organizing, and ends up being a discussion of Philly Socialists' base-building activities and their philosophy on the party. The episode starts off with a discussion of the experiences in PS to make the spaces more welcoming to everyone, the role of child-care and of strong sexual harassment policies, and how to provide spaces for everyone to become leaders. This is grounded in what PS calls base-building: for example, their English as a second language classes, their work in the Philadelphia Tenants Union and their community garden, where PS organize neighborhood residents to fight back against gentrification and reclaim land in Philadelphia. The conversation continues to PS's view of how the party should arise, before cycling back to the issues that started it.