Tag Archives: marx

Original air date August 22, 2017. Philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, José Martí, believed that knowledge and understanding do not originate within us, but come to us through our cultural institutions and that what is expressed when you “express yourself” is a collective mind and so if your culture is imperial, slave-holding, and expansionist, what kind of self will you express? …

Today we’re stalking the middle class – from Marx to Middletown (Muncie, IN) to Macomb County, Michigan – to reveal what it’s hiding. Our conversation with historian David Roediger took place about a month ago on October 14th and in between then and now fell November 3rd, Election Day in the U.S., and we have a new President-Elect – Joe …

The deeply racist Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner once wrote in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. In that same book Faulkner has the “nun,” which carries the meaning of prostitute in Shakespeare’s time, a Black drug addict named Nancy, offer that salvation comes from suffering. And though this is …

It’s become increasingly clear that the American Dream is dead.  Good riddance. Long ago Friedrich Engels identified economic mobility (said “dream” of wealth) in the US as a key barrier to class consciousness. Welcome to your waking hours, America. Today we explore the question, “Can Electoral politics lead the way to Revolution?” Marx, Engels, and Lenin insisted on the value …

In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote perhaps his most famous sentences: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” The “gulf” is where we …

Best known for his path-breaking work on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, Trinidadian C.L.R. James was often at the center of revolutionary politics and theory in the 20th century; a one-time Trotskyist and fully informed by a study of Marx, James’s greatest work extends from beyond the boundaries of politics and reaches into an attention to …

Our topic today is Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970. But first a brief note on the death of Kate Millett, last Wednesday, September 6th. Listeners of Interchange will know we discussed Millett’s own radical feminist book, Sexual Politics, back in May with Maggie Doherty. Doherty wrote an obituary …

Today on Interchange we confront the insidious myth of individualism with a contrasting scientific doctrine of interconnectedness. Much like the male brain and thoughts of sex, in the USA hardly a moment goes by without some commercial or institutional message encouraging us to “follow our dreams” and be true to ourselves. And it’s assumed we act on “our own” when …

Our program today is about the problem of work. In “Life Without Principle” Henry David Thoreau, our great American guide to “getting a life,” wrote of Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood…are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee …