Send us a Text Message.We discuss Yanis Varoufakis' new book 'Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,’ in which he argues that capitalism is dead and has been "replaced by something fundamentally different."
Jun 20, 2024
50 min
Send us a Text Message.Not unlike the Paris Commune, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which held power in that country for 133 heroic days in 1919, exerted influence through example in greater measure than its brief lease on life would suggest. Not only did it raise the profile and recast the soul of Georg Lukács, but in its own time, it was recognized as a failed example of communist revolution worth learning from. Soviet communism came to Hungary in the golden hour between the Bolshevik ...
May 28, 2024
1 hr
Send us a Text Message.We kick off our new 'beach reads' series with a discussion of Bukharin's 1921 text, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology.
May 1, 2024
43 min
Send us a Text Message.We are changing things up here at Measures Taken HQ! In this new series (which will supplement but not replace our former episode track) we discuss what's being talked about on the contemporary left.
Apr 10, 2024
54 min
Send us a Text Message.We discuss Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" as well as the responses and political positions of some of the pamphlet's main targets. We also examine the concept of left-wing communism itself, asking whether or not it is a category that can clarify our political lives today.
Feb 15, 2024
1 hr 1 min
Send us a Text Message.What components of Marxism can most successfully help us to understand the appearance and shape of the phenomenon of ‘Red Terror?’
Sep 1, 2023
1 hr 4 min
Send us a Text Message.The seizure of state power by Russian social democrats, and the success of their party in developing military and administrative capacities, forced the class-conscious worker the rest of the world over to decide to what extent it was appropriate to accept organizational leadership from the first and only proletarian dictatorship (if one does not count the inspired and brief experiments in Paris 1871). The choice all but made itself, especially if bearing witness to indu...
Feb 27, 2023
1 hr 9 min
Send us a Text Message.The climax of the World War would present socialists with the actuality of revolution and result in a new North Star for Marxism, but its immediate effects were to irrevocably destroy the fabric of the international socialist movement, and in doing so inaugurate a period of painful soul-searching. In this episode, we will trace the responses of socialists to the war, as well as responses to the existential crises it provoked.
Dec 2, 2022
56 min
Send us a Text Message.Ben is editor and translator of a number of important collections of primarily source documents from the Second International period, including Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Haymarket). He is also the author of Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline (Berghahn Books). You can support his translation work on Patreon by searching for his project, Marxism Translated.
Aug 4, 2022
53 min
Send us a Text Message.The question of Social Democracy’s role when it came to peasants and agricultural laborers opened the floodgates to a wide range of theoretical and tactical debates. In this episode, we will dive into this era’s landmark texts and strategic, Party-level debates and decisions on the agrarian question— a question that will arise and be contested many more times as we proceed through the history of Marxism as a political tradition.
May 2, 2022
1 hr
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