This week we entered the archives and poured through the codices and scrolls containing the wisdom of past episodes to give you this curated trash can of ideology. We highlighted some themes from the past six years of podcasting that we thought were worth underscoring and discussed relevance and how our ideas have changed.

Referenced Materials:
Our Underlying Philosophy of Dialectical Pessimism

• S1/Ep5: Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will
• S1/Ep26: The Proper Amount of Bumming People Out
• S4/Ep7: Death of The Left
• S5/Ep21: Pessimism is an Optimism: Revisiting Pessimism

Making Sense of Our Past

• S1/Ep27: Children of the Counterrevolution
• S3/Ep12: The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Enlightenment
• S3/Ep22: Stillborn Utopia -- The Unfulfilled Potential of the Republic
• S4/Ep3: Tragedy of American Socialism #1

Rethinking What It Means To “Be” Revolutionary

• S1/Ep10: The Right to the City: Changing the City, to Change Ourselves
• S2/Ep8: We Would Prefer Not To: Against a Politics of Catharsis
• S5/Ep15: The Legacy of William Morris
• S6/Ep15: Antifascism of Fools

A Willingness to Abandon Our Older Trajectory

• S4/Ep20: Labor Theory of Apocalypse
• S6/Ep5: One Plus One Is Three: The Poverty of "Third Campism"
• S6/Ep16: The Boys Figure Out Which Marxist Tendency is Correct
• S6/Ep19: To Front or Not to Front: The Question of "Popular Frontism"

The Major Obstacles/Challenges We Face

• S3/Ep5: Happiness Industry Socialism
• S3*/Ep17: Everything Is Recuperated
• S5/Ep9: You're Not Making Liberals Socialist, You're Just Making Socialists More Liberal
• S5/Ep19: The Dialectic of Degrowth: Socialists and the Burden of Ecological Disaster

Our Deep Skepticism/Hostility Toward Techno-Solutions

• S1/Ep31: The Future Has Been Canceled -- Stalling of Culture/Technology in a Decaying Society
• S2/Ep2: Partially Automated Regular Communism
• S2/Ep5: Socialism Without Sacrifice & Other Fake Futures We are Against
• S4/Ep4: No Ethical Technical Innovation Under Capitalism

Looking Ahead

• S4/Ep11: Marxism in Dialogue With Christianity
• S5/Ep12: The Dialectic of Apotheosis -- Lunacharsky and the Godbuilders
• S5/Ep16: Bathing in the Warm Stream
• S6/Ep22: Real Grouchy Old Man Hours: What's Left of the Left?

Regrettable Reading List

• The Red Jacobins: Thermidor & The Russian Revolution in 1921
• Party As Articulator
• The Tragedy of the Worker
• Revolution: An Intellectual History
• Left Wing Melancholia
• Excremental Happiness: From Neurotic Hedonism to Dialectical Pessimism

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This is an old episode of our friend Andrew's podcast that was recorded a few years ago. The podcast is now defunct, but we thought y'all deserved to hear it.

In this episode Jason and Andrew watched and discussed Guy Debord's 1974 film version of The Society of the Spectacle.

Enjoy and Happy New Year.

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*the actual episode*

We are joined again by our official France correspondent, Matthew. Matthew is a veteran of American Trot sectarian organizing and the labor movement who lives in France and is more intimately involved in the happenings than we are.
We discuss the failure of the New Popular Front, the ham-fisted triumph of Macron, and the death throes of the French political system.

French government ​of Michel Barnier toppled ​after losing no-confidence vote – as it happened
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/04/france-government-vote-no-confidence-barnier-lepen-europe-live

Macron ally François Bayrou appointed new French prime minister
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/13/macron-ally-francois-bayrou-appointed-new-french-prime-minister

How fall of government is proof that France's Fifth Republic 'no longer works'
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/politique/071224/how-fall-government-proof-frances-fifth-republic-no-longer-works?utm_source=article_offert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TRANSAC&utm_content=&utm_term=&xtor=EPR-1013-%5Barticle-offert%5D&M_BT=9679632603774

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