Cosmopod

This letter is in response to Conquering Democracy, Abolishing Political Representation by the Cibcom Collective. I appreciated the comrades' thought-provoking work and the opportunity to clarify my ideas in response. I have several peripheral agreements regarding the importance of democracy and the utility of workers' councils, and one fundamental disagreement about the nature of the democratic republic. Read by: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.

Rudy and Harry join Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization for a discussion on Rodrigo's approach to thinking about the problem of organization. We cover the need to move beyond certain dichotomies like vertical and horizontal, self-organized vs organized from the outside, the need for understanding organization ecologically, the problem of organizational fitness, and discuss the potential applications of the ideas in this book.

Annie joins Elisabeth Armstrong, author of Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949 for a discussion of the Beijing conference and the international women's movement of the period. They discuss the composition and politics of the Women's International Democratic Federation, the key figures in the WIDF who played a role in the Asian Women's Conference, the different rhetorical strategies formulated through the conference, including revolutionary motherhood and women's anti-colonialism, as well as the political and interpersonal dynamics between women in the WIDF from the imperial core and women from colonized countries. They then discuss the place of the conference in the broader communist movement, the role of state repression, and how the terrain of feminist politics has changed since the peak of the WIDF, drawing lessons for contemporary feminist and socialist movements.

A recent Jacobin piece by Chris Maisano argues that building "a Left that matters" requires focusing on Democratic Party electoral work, but we must be clear about the consequence of such an orientation: a middle-class Left that remains disconnected from the proletariat and abandons the fundamentals of Marxism. By Jacque Erie. Read By: Keir Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.

The Cibcom Collective argues that Communist society will require an overcoming of political representation in favor of forms of direct democracy like sortition and referendum. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.

Rudy joins Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and George Martin, authors of Urban Food Production for Ecosocialism: Cultivating the City for a discussion on urban agriculture. We talk about the history of food and the city, the ways the Global North/South divide is reflected in food, before focusing on the authors' fieldwork on what the political uses as well as limitations of urban food gardens are. We discuss examples in Ghana, Italy, the US, China and Cuba, and what is done right and wrong in each of these cases.

Transcription and commentary by SA Reed. Read by Cliff Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.

Amelia, RK, Harry and Rudy sit down for a discussion on systems approaches to ecology using as a basis H. T. Odum's Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy . We talk about Odum's innovations in the field of ecology, his ideas about the hierarchies of energy and matter, how to use Odum's framework to extend Marxist analysis of society towards constructing an eco-socialist program, and use that to critically evaluate several current political proposals including degrowth, unequal ecological exchange and eco-modernism. Other references: "Limits to growth" in communism? Bonaiuti, M. From bioeconomics to degrowth. London: Routledge, 2011. http://www.georgescuroegen.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/From_Bioeconomics_to_Degrowth_def.pdf Cockshott, Paul. "Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to Kantorovich." University of Glasgow(2008). https://www.academia.edu/download/68627453/standalonearticle.pdf Foster, J. B., and Holleman, H. "The theory of unequal ecological exchange: a Marx-Odum dialectic." Journal of Peasant Studies41.2 (2014): 199-233. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2014.889687 Kikstra, J. S., Mastrucci, A., Min, J., Riahi, K., & Rao, N. D. (2021). Decent living gaps and energy needs around the world. Environmental Research Letters, 16(9) https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac1c27 O'Neill, John. "Socialist calculation and environmental valuation: money, markets and ecology." Science & Society66.1 (2002): 137-151. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/siso.66.1.137.21006 Pirgmaier, E. (2018) Value, Capital and Nature. Rethinking the foundations of ecological economics. PhD thesis, University of Leeds. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/22895/

links to read and sign resolutions here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXgSds8qpoyqfwY-wXfs00htSRExsofCdvgLDRN-_Zn82IsQ/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc_9gWNbmroeapzEBICuZotHoLElzUalW_jD84jxqqkVF8L-w/viewform

Gil Schaeffer responds to Ben Grove's "Twelve-Step Program for Democrat Addiction" and its arguments about the need for a mass party, critiquing Mike Macnair, Ben Lewis and Lars Lih's concept of Erfurtian Marxism. Read By: Will Intro Music: ворожное озеро Гроза vwqp remix Outro Music: We are Friends Forever performed by Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment.