Episodes
Saturday Oct 07, 2023
TORY CONFERENCE 23 - INCOMPETENCE, FRAGMENTATION AND MADNESS - INTERESTING TIMES 69
Saturday Oct 07, 2023
Saturday Oct 07, 2023
In this podcast, we reflect on widely reported items from the 2023 Tory Part Conference, and plug into some of the wider political and philosophical issues they give rise to. [Free. 42 minutes.]
Thursday May 05, 2022
LAO TZU 47
Thursday May 05, 2022
Thursday May 05, 2022
In this podcast, we reflect of Chapter 60 of The Tao Te Ching in which Lao Tzu recommends a light touch on the part of rulers if destructivity is to be minimised in society. A light touch is possible when rulers and / or their advisors are aligned with the Tao and the processes of existence and life as they act through human beings. We relate Lao Tzu's recommendations to our current political state and the ever present realisation that governments do bad things even whilst some collective focus is necessary for our species survival. We examine variations on this insight found in neoliberal economic thought, Marxism and the anarchism. [Free. 36 minutes.]
Monday Mar 15, 2021
PEACEFUL PROTEST TO BE ILLEGAL? - INTERESTING TIMES 27
Monday Mar 15, 2021
Monday Mar 15, 2021
In this podcast we consider the ramifications on the recent murder of Sara Everhard and the violence of the police handling of the vigil expressing the ensuing grief and concern of women held on Clapham Common this weekend. We show how these matters are related to the lived experience of women throughout the UK as evidenced by outpourings on social media, and the authoritarian thrust of the current Tory government. Though the latter have attempted to distance themselves from the disgusting behaviour of their coercive force, the Metropolitan Police, we suggest that this is an ideological, mystifying move, given that today they are shepherding a bill through Parliament which will vastly reduce the right to peaceful protest. As always, we suggest what practically can be done to push back against this ghastly situation and lay the foundations of a decent society. [Free. 33 minutes.]
Sunday Jul 29, 2018
VALUE & NATURALLY OCCURRING COMMUNISM
Sunday Jul 29, 2018
Sunday Jul 29, 2018
This podcast is stimulated by David Graeber's remarks on value and a possible revolutionary ethical paradigm shift that could place value creation not in production of commodities but production of people. I follow Graeber, though with artistic license, jumping off from the platform he provides to extol the virtues of 'naturally occurring communism', to praise idleness, to see hope in the revitalisation of the flame of humanness. I draw on Adam Smith, Marx, Engels, the TV series Silicon Valley and Bertrand Russell. [Free. 26 minutes.]
Saturday Apr 01, 2017
FEMINISM 101
Saturday Apr 01, 2017
Saturday Apr 01, 2017
In this podcast, we roughly sketch out types of feminism including liberal, socialist, marxist and essentialist varients. We try to draw out the theoretical and practical difficulties encountered by these various approaches in the hope that a view of the terrain thus exposed might be useful to anybody currently struggling with the widespread and pathological back-lash to all emancipatory aspirations. [Free. 55 minutes.]
Tuesday Feb 28, 2017
THE BLUE PILL OR THE RED PILL? PART FOUR: POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY
Tuesday Feb 28, 2017
Tuesday Feb 28, 2017
In this podcast, we refer to the last scene of The Matrix in which Neo speaks directly to the hegemonic machines and explicitly draws attention to the political dimensions of the film. This scene invites us to understand the real-apparent binary as the opposition between the concrete political situation of slavery and exploitation and the ideological mystification which prevents the victims from throwing off their chains or even realising that they are in them. This leads us to a discussion of the attempts to make good the lacuna in Marxism around the details of ideological mystification by theorising a Freudian-Marxism. Dramatis Personae: Freud, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, Fromm, Reich, Marcusse, Engels. The final scene [3 minutes 31 seconds] is here:- https://youtu.be/aTL4qIIxg8A. See the blue pill - red pill choice in this four minute clip: https://youtu.be/zQ1_IbFFbzA. [Free. 39 minutes.]