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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

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The Regrettable Century

Our Regrettable Trash Can of Ideology

January 08, 2025 • Chris, Kevin, Jason, & Ben • Season 7 • Episode 3

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 how our ideas may have changed...

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: The Unfulfilled Potential of the Republic
S4/Ep3: The Tragedy of American Socialism

Rethinking What It Means To “Be” Revolutionary

S1/Ep10: The Right to the City
S2/Ep8: We Would Prefer Not To
S5/Ep15: The Legacy of William Morris
S6/Ep15: The Antifascism of Fools

A Willingness to Abandon Our Older Trajectory

S4/Ep20: Labor Theory of Apocalypse
S6/Ep5: One Plus One Is Three
S6/Ep16: The Boys Figure Out Which Marxist Tendency is Correct
S6/Ep19: To Front or Not to Front

The Major Obstacles/Challenges We Face

S3/Ep5: Happiness Industry Socialism
S3/Ep17: Everything Is Recuperated
S5/Ep9: You're Not Making Liberals Socialist...
S5/Ep19: The Dialectic of Degrowth

Our Deep Skepticism/Hostility Toward Techno-Solutions

S1/Ep31: The Future Has Been Canceled
S2/Ep2: Partially Automated Regular Communism
S2/Ep5: Socialism Without Sacrifice...
S4/Ep4: No Ethical Technical Innovation Under Capitalism

Looking Ahead

S4/Ep11: Marxism in Dialogue With Christianity
S5/Ep12: The Dialectic of Apotheosis
S5/Ep16: Bathing in the Warm Stream
S6/Ep22: Real Grouchy Old Man Hours

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