The Regrettable Century
The old forms of the Left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a Dialectical Pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
-- Antonio Gramsci
The Regrettable Century
Patreon Preview -- Books Chris Read in Grad School: The Peculiarities of German History
This week, we read and discussed Eley and Blackbourn's indispensable discussion of the Sonderweg, or special path, of German history. It is often said that Germany's path to the Holocaust begins with the failure of the bourgeois revolution to take hold. This book posits a top-down Bonapartist "revolution" led by Otto von Bismarck which thoroughly bourgeoisified German society from the top to the bottom.
Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984; Oxford Academic, 3 Oct. 2011)